He laughed aloud at the idea, but did not think it would be fun, and did not quite believe in his father’s being “hit,” either; but when half an hour later he returned and found the Colonel still sitting by Edith, who had recovered herself, and was talking with a good deal of animation, he felt irritated and impatient, and went off to his room and wrote in his “Impressions of Europe,” a kind of journal he was keeping of his tour, and which he meant to show “the girls,” by way of proving that _one_ American could go abroad and not indorse everything he saw, and make a fool of himself generally. His entry that night was in part as follows: “Oakwood is a fine old place, with an extensive park, a smoke-house, fine stables, a dog-kennel, and seven servants, to take care of two unprotected females. Edith Lyle, aged 27, is the handsomest woman I ever saw, even in America. Her features are perfect, especially her nose, which might have been the model for the Greek Slave. Not a bit of a pug, and her eyes are large and soft and liquid, as those of the ox-eyed Juno (I like that classical allusion; it shows reading), while her ears are the tiniest I ever saw,—just like little pink sea-shells,—and her splendid brown hair, with a shade or two of yellow sunshine in it, rippling back from her smooth white brow, just exactly curly enough, and natural, too, I’ll be bound. She don’t put it up in crimps, not she. Why, what a scarecrow Alice Creighton was, though, that time I caught her with those two forks hanging down about her eyes, with a kind of clamp or horse-shoe on them. I like people natural, as I am sure Edith is. I wonder what makes her go off into a kind of white faint all of a sudden. She did it twice to-day, and I would not wonder if she was given to fits. The governor is hit, sure. I never knew him seem as much interested in any one before. The idea of his leading her into the air and then holding those salts to her nose till he strangled her,—bah!” And, while Godfrey wrote thus in his journal, his father sat talking to Edith, and wondering to find how much she knew and how sensibly she expressed herself. Colonel Schuyler was not a man of many words, and seldom talked much to any one, but there was something about Edith which interested him greatly, and he sat by her until the twilight began to close around them, and his sister came to warn him against taking cold and exposing Edith, too. Then he went into the house, and, without exactly knowing it, felt a little disappointed when she left the room and did not come again. Colonel Schuyler kept a journal, too, in which he occasionally jotted down the incidents of the day; and that night, after recounting his arrival at Oakwood and his grief at finding his sister so great an invalid, he added: