"How so, oracular sybil?" I asked, laughing, but a little impressed by the gravity of her look and tone. "Before you sleep, you will lose a fortune, and be offered another," she said. "How I can lose what I have not, I do not understand," I replied; "but of a certainty I shall take one, if it be offered me." "If you are wise, you will," said Bess, and turned from me as having no more to say. At the instant, the ringing of a bell and blowing of a horn called those of our guests to dinner who were to take their repast under tents and awnings in the park, and I joined my father to make the round of the tables, where huge joints of beef and mutton, piles of Trent salmon and larded capons, and the like substantial viands, were rapidly disappearing, washed down with copious draughts of strong October, to which were added for the yeomen farmers brandy, wine, mead, and aqua vitæ. When we had seen that all were faring merrily, and had nodded and smiled acknowledgment of the cheers for "the Solicitor," and for "the heir of Temple Belwood," we joined the company assembling in the hall, and thence with proper ceremony to the ancient dining-room. There the talk ran on Vermuijden and his doings much more than on the rightful hero of the day, and voices rose and tongues wagged faster and faster as the men's glasses were replenished with wine of Burgundy, or Bourdeaux, or Champaign, and the women sipped hock and Bacharach and sherris. My left-hand neighbour at table was Mistress Emma Ryther, a buxom girl, with great ox-eyes that never changed. She was accounted one of the beauties of the Isle, and indeed as a piece of flesh and blood she was pretty enough. I scarcely knew whether I liked or misliked her, for her manner to me seemed to betoken that she expected me to whistle, and was ready to come. Perhaps there would have been no more than a toss-up between liking and misliking, since I had that conceit in my head, if I had never seen the divine beauty which shines from the soul. Having seen that, Mistress Ryther was to me but a well-painted figure in porcelain. While she babbled nothings to me, I wondered that I could ever have thought otherwise of her than I did to-day. Some perception of my state of mind she showed by saying tartly: "Your head is as full of the Dutch as everybody's."