“Oh! ha, ha, ha, ha,” laughed the colonel.
“That is a very satisfactory reply, upon my word,” commented the good woman, covering her cakes with honey.
“Don’t—don’t—that fellow will be the death of me!”
“Pleasant prospect to laugh at—that!” said his wife, twisting a luscious segment of her now well-sauced buckwheat around the fork, preparatory to lifting it to her lips.
“Oh! do let us have the joke, if there is a joke, papa,” pleaded Cornelia.
“Hem! well, listen, then!” said Colonel Compton, reading:
“Distinguished arrival at McGuire’s Hotel. Lord William Daw, the second son of the most noble, the Marquis of Eaglecliff, arrived at this place last evening. His lordship, accompanied by his tutor, the Rev. Henry Murray, is now on a tour of the United States, and visits Winchester for the purpose of becoming acquainted with the history and antiquities of the town!”
“That is exceedingly rich! that will quite do!” commented the colonel, laying down his newspaper, and turning with a comic expression toward Marguerite.
She was looking, by the by, in high beauty, though her morning costume was more picturesque than elegant, and more careless than either, and consisted simply of a dark chintz wrapper, over which, drawn closely around her shoulders, was a scarlet crape shawl, in fine contrast with the lustrous purple sheen of her black hair, one-half of which was rolled in a careless mass at the nape of her neck, and the other dropped in rich ringlets down each side of her glowing, brilliant face.
“Hem! the antiquities of Winchester. I rather suspect it is the juvenilities that our young antiquarian is in chase of. Pray, Miss De Lancie, are you one of the antiquities?”