He was a neighbour who had joined their dinner-party, Eustace Lyle, a Roman Catholic, and the richest commoner in the county; for he had succeeded to a great estate early in his minority, which had only this year terminated.
‘I certainly do not know the horse,’ said Mr. Lyle; ‘but if Mr. Coningsby would describe the rider, perhaps—’
‘He is a man something under thirty,’ said Coningsby, ‘pale, with dark hair. We met in a sort of forest-inn during a storm. A most singular man! Indeed, I never met any one who seemed to me so clever, or to say such remarkable things.’
‘He must have been the spirit of the storm,’ said Lady Everingham.
‘Charles Verney has a great deal of dark hair,’ said Lady Theresa. ‘But then he is anything but pale, and his eyes are blue.’
‘And certainly he keeps his wonderful things for your ear, Theresa,’ said her sister.
‘I wish that Mr. Coningsby would tell us some of the wonderful things he said,’ said the Duchess, smiling.
‘Take a glass of wine first with my mother, Coningsby,’ said Henry Sydney, who had just finished helping them all to fish.
Coningsby had too much tact to be entrapped into a long story. He already regretted that he had been betrayed into any allusion to the stranger. He had a wild, fanciful notion, that their meeting ought to have been preserved as a sacred secret. But he had been impelled to refer to it in the first instance by the chance observation of Lady Everingham; and he had pursued his remark from the hope that the conversation might have led to the discovery of the unknown. When he found that his inquiry in this respect was unsuccessful, he was willing to turn the conversation. In reply to the Duchess, then, he generally described the talk of the stranger as full of lively anecdote and epigrammatic views of life; and gave them, for example, a saying of an illustrious foreign Prince, which was quite new and pointed, and which Coningsby told well. This led to a new train of discourse. The Duke also knew this illustrious foreign Prince, and told another story of him; and Lord Everingham had played whist with this illustrious foreign Prince often at the Travellers’, and this led to a third story; none of them too long. Then Lady Everingham came in again, and sparkled agreeably. She, indeed, sustained throughout dinner the principal weight of the conversation; but, as she asked questions of everybody, all seemed to contribute. Even the voice of Mr. Lyle, who was rather bashful, was occasionally heard in reply. Coningsby, who had at first unintentionally taken a more leading part than he aspired to, would have retired into the background for the rest of the dinner, but Lady Everingham continually signalled him out for her questions, and as she sat opposite to him, he seemed the person to whom they were principally addressed.
At length the ladies rose to retire. A very great personage in a foreign, but not remote country, once mentioned to the writer of these pages, that he ascribed the superiority of the English in political life, in their conduct of public business and practical views of affairs, in a great measure to ‘that little half-hour’ that separates, after dinner, the dark from the fair sex. The writer humbly submitted, that if the period of disjunction were strictly limited to a ‘little half-hour,’ its salutary consequences for both sexes need not be disputed, but that in England the ‘little half-hour’ was too apt to swell into a term of far more awful character and duration. Lady Everingham was a disciple of the ‘very little half-hour’ school; for, as she gaily followed her mother, she said to Coningsby, whose gracious lot it was to usher them from the apartment: