'Fancy Evelyn Desmond airing flannel bags for the gouty feet of old Collingwood, fomenting his bald pate--(he is bald, isn't he?)--putting his lovely teeth into a tumbler at night, unlacing his stays, and all that sort of thing, don't you know!' From this rough jesting with names in which he had an interest so vital now, Trevor Chute, we say, gladly sought the privacy of his own room, where, stretched upon a sofa, he gave himself tip to the luxury of lonely thinking, while watching the pale blue wreaths evoked from his meerschaum bowl floating upward into the lofty ceiling overhead, while the drowsy hum of the city came through the green jalousies of the windows, which opened to the Kongens Nytorv, and faced the Theatre Royal. Would this alliance mar for ever the chances of the Major, or redouble them, as he would be quite _en famille_ at Carnaby Court and the town mansion in Piccadilly? He recalled the parting words of Clare, and thrust the speculation aside as unworthy the consideration of a second. He could awaken in the morning now with other thoughts than the dull ache of the bitter olden time; for though their prospects were vague and undefined, he had her renewed promise, and now more than ever did he recall it, with the delicious threat that accompanied the renewal. 'Clare, Clare!' he muttered aloud; and with all the passionate longing of a lad of twenty, the man's heart went out to her, the absent one. She was his in spirit only; but oh, for Surrey's magic mirror, to bring her before him once again, that he might revel on the calm poses of her statuesque figure, her soft, yet aristocratic face, and the curve of her lips, that were exquisite as those of a Greuze--even as Surrey revelled on the beauties of Geraldine when conjured up by Cornelius Agrippa! Again he was sunk in thoughts of her, as when far away amid the awful and undisturbed solitude of the Himalayan forests, where the pines that rose to the height of two hundred feet were tipped with sunshine, while all was night below; and where the torrents, with their ceaseless roar, that wearied the ear, when, swollen by the winter rains, they tore past the lonely cantonment of Landour, where the last home of Beverley and many more lie, rolling on and on to the plains and tea-gardens of Assam.