a calmer and more long-headed fashion.  Devereux’s toilet most of the young fellows held to be perfection; yet it seemed to trouble him less than all the rest.  I believe it was the elegant and slender shape that would have set off anything, and that gave to his handsome costume and ‘properties’ an undefinable grace not their own.  Indeed, as he leaned his elbow upon the window sash, looking carelessly across the river, he did not seem much to care what became of the labours of his toilet.

’I have not seen her since I came; and now I’m going to this stupid ball on the chance of meeting her there.  And she’ll not come—­she avoids me—­the chance of meeting her—­and she’ll not come.  Well! if she be not kind to me, what care I for whom she be?  And what great matter, after all, if she were there.  She’d be, I suppose, on her high horse—­and—­and ’tis not a feather to me.  Let her take her own way.  What care I?  If she’s happy, why shouldn’t I—­why shouldn’t I?’

Five minutes after:—­

’Who the plague are these fellows in the Phoenix?  How the brutes howl over their liquor!’ said Devereux, as he and Puddock, at the door-steps, awaited Cluffe, who was fixing his buckles in the drawing-room.

‘The Corporation of Tailors,’ answered Puddock, a little loftily, for he was not inwardly pleased that the precincts of the ‘Phoenix’ should be profaned by their mechanical orgies.

Through the open bow window of the great oak parlour of the inn was heard the mighty voice of the president, who was now in the thick of his political toasts.

‘Odds bud!’ lisped little Puddock, ‘what a stentorian voice!’

‘Considering it issues from a tailor!’ acquiesced Devereux, who thought he recognised the accents, and hated tailors, who plagued him with long bills and dangerous menaces.

’May the friends of the Marquis of Kildare be ever blessed with the tailor’s thimble,’ declaimed the portentous toast master.  ’May the needle of distress be ever pointed at all mock patriots; and a hot needle and a burning thread to all sewers of sedition!’ and then came an applauding roar.

’And may you ride into town on your own goose, with a hot needle behind you, you roaring pigmy!’ added Devereux.

‘The Irish cooks that can’t relish French sauce!’ enunciated the same grand voice, that floated, mellowed, over the field.

‘Sauce, indeed!’ said Puddock, with an indignant lisp, as Cluffe, having joined them, they set forward together; ’I saw some of them going in, Sir, and to look at their vulgar, unthinking countenances, you’d say they had not capacity to distinguish between the taste of a quail and a goose; but, by Jove!  Sir, they have a dinner. You’re a politician, Cluffe, and read the papers.  You remember the bill of fare—­don’t you?—­at the Lord Mayor’s entertainment in London.’

Cluffe, whose mind was full of other matters, nodded his head with a grunt.