Lying on the sofa, in the low-roofed, old-fashioned drawing-room at Fortinbras, and shrouded by a leopard-skin railway-rug, which Mrs. MacClaverhouse had insisted on casting over him, the young Captain looked like an invalid Titan; but a Titan with a nimbus of waving auburn hair about his head, and the brightest blue eyes that ever took a fierce light amid the glare of battle, or softened to feminine tenderness when they looked on a woman's face. Lady Cecil contemplated her aunt's favourite at her leisure as she sat by an open window, with her face quite hidden in the shadow of drooping curtains and closed Venetians. And she had fancied him such a vulgar, clumsy creature--a freckled, red-haired object,--like a tobacconist's Highlander in modern costume, a loutish Caledonian Hercules, with a Gaelic sing-song in his voice, and with no belief in any thing but the grandeur of Princes Street, Edinburgh, and the immortality of Robert Burns. Cecil Chudleigh looked at him slily from beneath the shadow of her long lashes, and smiled at the recollection of her old fancies. "As if one's idea of a place or person were ever any thing like the reality," she thought. "I ought to have known that Captain Gordon would prove the very opposite of the image I had made him." She took up some books presently from the table near her, and looked at the titles. "How can you ask me to read to Captain Gordon, auntie," she demanded, archly, "when you know we have no books or papers that can interest him? We have neither _Bell's Life_, nor the _United-Service Gazette_; nor yet 'Post and Scarlet,' or 'Silk and Paddock,' or whatever those barbarous books are called that gentlemen are so fond of. I think there are some odd numbers of _Mr. Sponge's Sporting-Tour_ in a cupboard in Dorset Square, and I dare say we could get them sent down by post; but for to-day----" "Will you read some of Hugo's verses?" asked Captain Gordon. "I mustn't talk slang to a lady, or I would entreat you not to chaff me while I'm on the sick-list. I have read as much sporting literature as any man, I dare say, in my day; and _Post and Paddock_ is a capital book, I do assure you, Lady Cecil; but I think I know my Tennyson too. I have recited 'Locksley Hall' from the first line to the last, out yonder, when we've been dreadfully hard-up for talk. And you should have seen how scared my _Kitmutghar_ looked! I think he fancied our great Alfred's masterpiece was a volley of bad language; they're so unaccustomed to hear any thing _but_ bad language from Englishmen, poor fellows. If I am really to be treated as an invalid, and dear foolish auntie here insists upon it, I will exercise my prerogative, and demand one of Hugo's odes." Cecil opened the little volume that she had carried to the top of Fortinbras Keep, and turned the leaves listlessly, with slim white fingers that sparkled faintly with the gems in quaint old-fashioned rings.