"Exactly," replied Richard, but in a strange faint voice, and as he spoke he felt that the keen grey eyes of Downie were regarding him attentively by the waxen lights of the chandelier, which Mr. Jasper Funnel and two tall footmen had just illuminated, at the same time drawing the heavy curtains of crimson damask over the last flash of the setting sun, and the ruddy sea whose waves were rolling in blue and gold, between the bluffs of Land's End and the rocky Isles of Scilly. "You cannot be a woman-hater, Dick?" "No--far from it," replied Richard, as a soft expression stole over his manly face; "there can be no such thing in nature." "The truth is--but take your wine--I strongly fear, that during your military peregrinations, you have got yourself entangled now--and unworthily perhaps." "My lord--you are mistaken," replied Richard firmly--almost sternly; "but what causes you to think so?" "Your so decidedly declining an introduction to General Trecarrel and his two daughters--the most beautiful girls in the duchy of Cornwall. They come of a good family too; and as the couplet has it:-- "'By Tre, Pol, and Pen, Ye may know the Cornish men.'" "The General resides somewhere near Porthellick, does he not?" asked Downie, who saw that his brother was changing colour, or rather losing it fast. "Some one told me, Dick, that it was rumoured you got into a scrape in Edinburgh, 'that village somewhere in the North,' as one of our humourists calls it; it was to the effect that your landlady had fallen over head and ears in love with her handsome lodger, who was ditto ditto in her debt, and had to soothe her ruffled feelings and settle her bill, by matrimony at sight." "An utter scandal!" said Richard, now laughing. "Your allowance to me, ever since I left the Cornish Light Infantry, has been too generous for such a catastrophe ever to occur." "And next came a story, that when you were at Montreal with the regiment, you made a precious mess of it with some pretty girl, and--to use Downie's phraseology--parted as heart-broken lovers, to figure as plaintiff and defendant at the bar." "Worse still and as false, my lord!" exclaimed Richard, now pale with suppressed passion. "Don't look so darkly, Richard," said Lord Lamorna, who saw the flash in his nephew's dark blue eyes; "I have had a pretty little box at Chertsey, and a villa at St. John's Wood in my day, when my friends, raven-tressed, or golden-haired as the case might be, were amiable and tenderly attached--but deuced expensive; so I must not be severe upon you," added the old man, with his dry cackling laugh. "It is not these kind of little arrangements I fear, but a _mésalliance_; and there are scandals even in London--yes, even in the mighty world of London, though there they soon die; they don't live and take root, as in the so-called purer air of the country."