“I created a fine sensation all along the Queen’s highway _en route_ home. Alice and Reginald have never stopped chaffing me ever since. You ask me how he plays the _rôle_ of married man? Capitally, my dear fellow; and as to your unkind insinuation that I must be rather in the way, considering they are so recently married, you never were more mistaken in your life. They are not a bit a spooney couple; at least I never see any billing or cooing, thank goodness, and I favour them with a good deal of my society; but anyone can see with half an eye that each thinks the other perfection, and that they suit down to the ground. He has got a fortnight’s domestic privilege leave to go and see poor Maitland of the Blues, who is dying at Cannes; they were great chums always, and at Eton together. Meanwhile I remain here and help old Miss Fane (a bitter specimen of the unappropriated blessing) to take care of the fair châtelaine; and as I am to exercise the hunters, and have the run of the stable, I am promising myself five days a week between the two packs, and the very cream of hunting. I wish you would go to Thomas and hurry him with my tops, and run me in for another fortnight’s leave, as enclosed. If the chief looks grumpy, say I have broken my collarbone. I’ll do as much for you another time. “Yours in clover, “GEOFFREY SAVILLE.” CHAPTER IV. A PRACTICAL JOKE. Sir Reginald left for Cannes the end of November, intending to spend a week there, and to be home, of course, long before Christmas. Meanwhile, a plot he little dreamt of had been hatched for his benefit. A storm was brewing; in fact, a regular cyclone threatened his domestic atmosphere. When he was in India with the Fifth Hussars, among his few lady acquaintances outside the regiment there was one who had taken an immense fancy to him--a fancy he by no means reciprocated. She was the daughter of an old Commissariat officer, who had survived to enjoy his off-reckonings and settled down at Cheetapore. “After thirty-eight years of India, he could not stand England,” he said; “one winter there would finish him.” Miss Mason had been already four seasons on the plains. The climate was beginning to tarnish her beauty--the dark Italian style, her friends declared. Her foes, on the other hand, did not scruple to accuse her of “four annas in the rupee”--native blood, in fact. She was, nevertheless, one of the belles of the station. Time was flying, as I have said before, her good looks were waning, and she was becoming extremely anxious to be settled. Fully determined to marry well, thoroughly bold and unscrupulous, and believing firmly in Thackeray’s dictum, “that any woman who has not positively a hump can marry any man she pleases,” she looked about her, to see whom she would have.