"I have an ornithological thought in my brain, hatching, Lady Dora; I propose sketching all my friends, à la plume."
"What will you make me?" she asked, hoping to change the style of their previous conversation.
"You!" and he lowered his tone, and looked fixedly at her. She could not withdraw her gaze, he was sketching her brow—"You!—you shall be the fabled weevil, and I, the sick man, fit to die, turning my face to you to implore for life. Do not turn your head away, and thus bid that sickness be to death; but, extracting my heart's disease, with your sweet breath, fly upwards to heaven, and burn it out by the sun that we may so live together!"
"You must be mad!" she involuntarily cried, turning her eyes hastily to where her mother sat. But she had heard nothing; they were at some distance from her, and he spoke so low.
"Yes, perhaps I am; but madmen have happy dreams sometimes, we cannot refuse them these, where their reality is so hopeless and sad. But you have not answered me; may I place you among my ornithological specimens, as the milkwhite weevil of my thoughts?"
"And if not the sick man," she asked, and the voice trembled, though she endeavoured to smile as in jesting, "what will you depict yourself?"
"A goose!" he answered, laughing; "and I will lend your ladyship my quills to write to Florence! Am I not a bon enfant?"
This term in French, so completely in keeping with the character of the bird he chose as his representative, provoked a laugh even from Lady Dora, beneath which she covered, at least she fancied she covered, her confusion.
"How very lively you are, Dora!" said her mother approaching. "What has occurred?"
"A most absurd error on my part," he answered. "Only fancy, Lady Ripley: I was to-day forgetting sex, character—all, and (the quiver of arrows misled me) was going to transform Lady Dora into Cupid! Ye gods! who could withstand arrows from such a bow?"