Captain DeWitt said that if so it would be the tenth, to his certain knowledge.

‘Not great campaign!’ my father insisted:  ‘mere skirmishes before this.’

They conversed in humorous undertones, each in turn seeming to turn over the earth of some amusing reminiscence, so rapt, that as far as regarded their perception of it, the assembly might have been nowhere.  Perhaps, consequently, they became observed with all but undivided attention.  My father’s hand was on my shoulder, his head toward Captain DeWitt; instead of subduing his voice, he gave it a moderate pitch, at which it was not intrusive, and was musical, to my ear charming, especially when he continued talking through his soft laughter, like a hunter that would in good humour press for his game through links of water-nymphs.

Lady Denewdney’s fan took to beating time meditatively.  Two or three times she kept it elevated, and in vain:  the flow of their interchangeing speech was uninterrupted.  At last my father bowed to her from a distance.  She signalled:  his eyelids pleaded short sight, awakening to the apprehension of a pleasant fact:  the fan tapped, and he halted his march, leaning scarce perceptibly in her direction.  The fan showed distress.  Thereupon, his voice subsided in his conversation, with a concluding flash of animation across his features, like a brook that comes to the leap on a descent, and he left us.

Captain DeWitt and I were led by a common attraction to the portico, the truth being that we neither of us could pace easily nor talk with perfect abandonment under eye-fire any longer.

‘Look,’ said he to me, pointing at the equipages and equestrians:  ’you’ll see a sight like this in dozens—­dozens of our cities and towns!  The wealth of this country is frightful.’

My reply, addressed at the same time mentally to Temple at sea, was: 

‘Well, as long as we have the handsomest women, I don’t care.’

Captain DeWitt was not so sure that we had.  The Provencal women, the women of a part of South Germany, and certain favoured spots of Italy, might challenge us, he thought.  This was a point I could argue on, or, I should rather say, take up the cudgels, for I deemed such opinions treason to one’s country and an outrage to common sense, and I embarked in controversy with the single-minded intention of knocking down the man who held them.

He accepted his thrashing complacently.

‘Now here comes a young lady on horseback,’ he said; ’do you spy her? dark hair, thick eyebrows, rides well, followed by a groom.  Is she a Beauty?’

In the heat of patriotism I declared she was handsome, and repeated it, though I experienced a twinge of remorse, like what I should have felt had I given Minerva the apple instead of Venus.

‘Oh!’ he commented, and stepped down to the road to meet her, beginning, in my hearing, ‘I am the bearer of a compliment—­’ Her thick eyebrows stood in a knot, then she glanced at me and hung pensive.  She had not to wait a minute before my father came to her side.