Lord Mount Helicon felt for a moment intensely disgusted. Blanche’s beauty, and her simple, pretty manner, had touched him, as far as a man could be touched who had so many irons in the fire as his lordship, but the impulse for _fun_, the delight he experienced in quizzing his unsuspecting friend, soon overcame all other feelings, and he proceeded to egg Lacquers on, and assure him of his undoubted success, for the express purpose of amusing himself with the hussar’s method of courtship. “Besides,” thought he, “such a flat as this hanging about her will keep the other fellows off; and with a girl like _her_, I shall have little difficulty in ‘cutting _him_ out.’” So he advised his friend to take time, and “allow her to get accustomed to his society, and gradually entangled in his fascinations; and then, my dear fellow,” he added, “when she finds she can’t live without you--when she has got used to your engaging ways, as she is to her poodle’s--when she can no more bear to be parted from you than from her bullfinch, then speak up like a man--bring all your science into play--come with a rush--and win cleverly at the finish!” “Ay, that’s all very well,” mused the captain, “that’s just my idea; but in the meantime some fellow might cut me out. Now, there’s our Major--D’Orville, you know (’gad, how hot it is! let’s lean over the rails)--D’Orville seems to be always in Grosvenor Square. He’s an old fellow, too, but he has a deuced taking way with women. I don’t know what they see in him either. To be sure he _was_ good-looking; but he’s a man of no education” (Lacquers himself could scarcely spell his own name), “and he must be forty, if he’s a day. Look at this fellow on the black cob. By Jove! it’s old Bounce, and talk of the devil--there’s D’Orville riding with Miss Kettering next the rails. This _is_ a go.”