She paused, with a volume open at those wonderful verses in which the classic Sybarite bewails the weariness of his felicity; and, pushing the Venetian shutter a little way open, she began to read, with a half-smile upon her face. The summer sunlight flooded her face and figure, and the summer air fluttered one loose tress of her dark-brown hair, as her head drooped over her book. "D'implacables faveurs me poursuivent sans cease, Vous m'avez flétri dans ma fleur, Dieux! donnez l'espérance à ma froide jeunesse, Je vous rends tous ces biens pour un pen de bonheur." When Cecil came to these closing lines of the Sybarite's complaint, the Scottish Hercules flung off his leopard-skin, and walked across the little room to the open window by which Lady Cecil was seated. "It's no use, auntie," he said; "I'm not an invalid. If I loll upon that sofa, Lady Cecil will take me for a modern Celsus; and, upon my word, I _have_ felt like that fellow once or twice in my life. I've never been exactly savage with Providence for giving me so many blessings; but I have felt as if I should like to have had a little more of the fun of wishing for things. Look at my position. I'm not used up, and I don't affect to be used up, like some fellows. I don't make a howling about having lost the faculty of pleasure, or the belief in my fellow-men, or any thing of that kind. I'm no disciple of Alfred de Musset, or Owen Meredith; but I really have run through the better part of the pleasures that last most men their lifetime. There's scarcely any thing in the way of adventure that you can propose to me that I haven't done, from tooling a drag along the Lady's Mile when the carriages were thickest, to ascending Mont Blanc or scaling a red-hot brick wall on a fireman's ladder. There's scarcely any route you can suggest to me for a holiday tour that I'm not as familiar with as Murray. And yet I'm only seven-and-twenty. So long as we have plenty to do in India I shall be right enough; but if our fellows should ever come to be planted in country quarters, without any prospect of work, what's to become of me? And then I've promised to sell out in a few years," he added, in a much graver tone. "Promised to sell out!" screamed Mrs. MacClaverhouse. "That's your father's doing, I know; but you won't leave the army until you marry, I suppose?" "Oh no, not until I marry." He took up the volume of poems which Cecil had laid down. "Let me read to you, ladies," he said; "am I not here to minister to your pleasures and obey your behests? Tell me your favourites, Lady Cecil."