He sang little French songs, with no voice, but quite a good French accent, and told little anecdotes with no particular point, but in French and Italian (so that the point was never missed); and we all laughed and admired without quite knowing why, except that he was the lord of the manor. On these festive occasions poor Lintot's confidence and power of amusing seemed to desert him altogether; he sat glum in a corner. Though a radical and a sceptic, and a peace-at-any-price man, he was much impressed by the social status of the army and the church. Of the doctor, a very clever and accomplished person, and the best educated man for miles around, he thought little; but the rector, the colonel, the poor captain, even, now a mere land-steward, seemed to fill him with respectful awe. And for his pains he was cruelly snubbed by Mrs. Captain and Mrs. Rector and their plain daughters, who little guessed what talents he concealed, and thought him quite a common little man, hardly fit to turn over the leaves of their music. It soon became pretty evident that Ibbetson was very much smitten with a Mrs. Deane, the widow of a brewer, a very handsome woman indeed, in her own estimation and mine, and everybody else's, except Mr. Lintot's, who said, "Pooh, you should see my wife!" Her mother, Mrs. Glyn, excelled us all in her admiration of Colonel Ibbetson. For instance, Mrs. Deane would play some common little waltz of the cheap kind that is never either remembered or forgotten, and Mrs. Glyn would exclaim, "_Is_ not that _lovely_?" And Ibbetson would say: "Charming! charming! Whose is it? Rossini's? Mozart's?" "Why, no, my dear colonel. Don't you remember? _It's your own_!" "Ah, so it is! I had quite forgotten." And general laughter and applause would burst forth at such a natural mistake on the part of our great man. Well, I could neither play nor sing, and found it far easier by this time to speak English than French, especially to English people who were ignorant of any language but their own. Yet sometimes Colonel Ibbetson would seem quite proud of me. "Deux metres, bien sonnes!" he would say, alluding to my stature, "et le profil d'Antinoues!" which he would pronounce without the two little dots on the _u_.