"But anyway," concluded Percival, after he had explained Mauburn's position to his sister, "he's a good fellow, and if you suit each other even the unexpected wouldn't make any difference." "Of course not," she assented, "'the rank is but the guinea's stamp,' I know--but I wasn't meaning to be married for quite a time yet, anyway,--it's such fun just being engaged." "A mint julep?" Mauburn was inquiring of one who had proposed it. "Does it have whiskey in it?" "It does," replied Percival, overhearing the question; "whiskey may be said to pervade, even to infest it. Try five or six, old man; that many make a great one-night trouble cure. And I can't have any one with troubles on this Cunarder--not for the next thirty days. I need cheerfulness and rest for a long time after this day in town. Ah! General Hemingway says that dinner is served; let's be at it before the things get all hot!" CHAPTER XXVII. A Sensational Turn in the Milbrey Fortunes It was a morning early in November. In the sedate Milbrey dining-room a brisk wood-fire dulled the edge of the first autumn chill. At the breakfast-table, comfortably near the hearth, sat Horace Milbrey. With pointed spoon he had daintily scooped the golden pulp from a Florida orange, touched the tips of his slender white fingers to the surface of the water in the bowl, and was now glancing leisurely at the headlines of his paper, while his breakfast appetite gained agreeable zest from the acid fruit. On the second page of the paper the names in a brief item arrested his errant glance. It disclosed that Mr. Percival Bines had left New York the day before with a party of guests on his special car, to shoot quail in North Carolina. Mr. Milbrey glanced at the two shells of the orange which the butler was then removing. "What a hopeless brute that fellow was!" he reflected.. He was recalling a dictum once pronounced by Mr. Bines. "Oranges should never be eaten in public," he had said with that lordly air of dogmatism characteristic of him. "The only right way to eat a juicy orange is to disrobe, grasp the fruit firmly in both hands and climb into a bath-tub half full of water." The finished epicure shuddered at the recollection, poignantly, quite as if a saw were being filed in the next room. The disagreeable emotion was allayed, however, by the sight of his next course--_oeufs aux saucissons_. Tender, poetic memories stirred within him. The little truffled French sausages aroused his better nature. Two of them reposed luxuriously upon an egg-divan in the dainty French baking-dish of dull green. Over them--a fitting baptism, was the rich wine sauce of golden brown--a sauce that might have been the tears of envious angels, wept over a mortal creation so faultlessly precious.