"I am so glad you like Victor Hugo. Pray forgive me for being so impertinent as to look over your shoulder; but I have been searching for you every where, and I am to take you home to breakfast, please; if you are Lady Cecil Chudleigh, and I am almost sure you are." She started to her feet, and looked at the speaker. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen--tall, and grand, and fair, the very type of a classic hero, she fancied, as he stood before her on the battlements, with the winds lifting the short auburn curls from his bare forehead. He was no more like the traditional Scotchman than the Duke d'Aumâle is like one of Gilray's Frenchmen. There was no more odour of the parvenu about him than about a Bayard or a Napier. In all her life she had never seen any one like him. It was not because he was handsome that she was struck by his appearance; for she had generally hated handsome men as the most obnoxious of their species. It was because he was--himself. For once in her life; Lord Aspendell's daughter, whose calm reserve was so near akin to _hauteur_, was fairly startled. "And are you really Captain Gordon?" she asked, amazed. "I am indeed; and that question tells me that I was right, and you are Lady Cecil, and we are--at least we ought to be--cousins, since dear Aunt MacClaverhouse stands in the same relation to both of us." CHAPTER III. HECTOR. The trio in the little breakfast-parlour in Sea-View Cottage, Fortinbras, was perhaps one of the pleasantest parties that ever met at so simply furnished a board. The spirit of the immortal Cliquot, whose vintages have made his widow's name so celebrated, may have smiled contemptuously at such a breakfast-table, on which the strongest beverages were tea and coffee; the mighty chiefs of Philippe's and the Maison Dorée would have held up their hands and shrugged their shoulders with amazement if told that these benighted insulars could really enjoy these coarse viands, and feel no national craving for suicide, or national tendency to spleen, before the barbarous meal was concluded. And yet there are few _cabinets particuliers_ on the Boulevards whose gaudily-papered walls have ever echoed to happier laughter than that of the young Indian hero, as he gave a serio-comic rendering of his adventures, warding off all praise of great and gallant deeds by the playful tone which made peril seem a joke, and desperate valour the most commonplace quality of man.