"You are intimate with the Misses Saville," he said; "what charming girls they are! I have just left them at Naples, where they have been spending the carnival. I saw them almost every day, and capitally we enjoyed ourselves. Their Italian sister-in-law spirited them up to mask, and to make a real carnival of it. A most lovely woman that. Did you ever see Mrs. Saville, Lady Lodore?" "Never," replied his auditress. "Such eyes! Gazelles, and stars, and suns, and the whole range of poetic imagery, might be sought in vain, to do justice to her large dark eyes. She is very young--scarcely twenty: and to see her with her child, is positively a finer tableau than any Raphael or Correggio in the world. She has a little girl, not a year old, with golden hair, and eyes as black as the mother's--the most beautiful little thing, and so intelligent. Saville doats on it: no wonder--he is not himself handsome, you know; though the lovely Clorinda would stab me if she heard me say so. She positively adores him. You should have seen them together." Lady Lodore turned on him one of her sweetest smiles, and in her blandest tone, said, "If you could only get me an ice from that servant, who I see immovable behind those dear, wonderful dowagers, you would so oblige me." He was gone in a minute; and on his return, Lady Lodore was so deeply engrossed in being persuaded to go to the next drawing room, by the young and new-married Countess of G--, that she could only reward him with another heavenly smile. He was obliged to take his carnival at Naples to some other listener.