“Allons—stop there! False knight and recreant! whose colors do you wear while you uphold the peerless beauty of Georgia? What would Miss Clifton of Clifton say to your admiration?”
“Ridiculous, sir! Miss Clifton is herself very beautiful but not the most beautiful. Miss Clifton has other and rarer distinctions, I am proud to say?”
“Oh, I understand—her family name!—nevertheless, be hanged if I don’t believe you have been in love with Georgia!”
“Impossible, sir! The perfect beauty of the young girl struck me forcibly, as it strikes all others—nay, more—impressed my imagination deeply perhaps. I confess to a penchant for female beauty—and—observe—it is the artist’s taste, sir, not the sultan’s. But in love with Georgia! Impossible, sir! She was a girl of humble parentage!”
“Ah! then you think it quite ‘impossible’ that a gentleman born, should be in love with a girl of ‘humble parentage?’”
“Preposterous, sir!—utterly preposterous! Pray, let us hear no more about it!”
“Yet your uncle—”
“My uncle married such an one, you would say. Old gentlemen, living on their own estates, will do such things. And the world charitably ascribes it to dotage, smiles and forgives them. You will oblige me by changing the subject, Frank.”
Fairfax fell into reverie, and Clifton dropped into thought, and they rode on for some time in silence, and in—joy—until—
“Floods and furies! Fire and flames!! Lightning and tempests, and sudden death!!!” exclaimed Fairfax, rearing and backing his horse with a terrible jerk, and throwing himself from the saddle, bathed in perspiration, and shaking with terror. “Look! Look there! There at your feet! Back! Back your horse, unless you wish to ride straight to the kingdom of Heaven, or—to the other place! Oh, blessed Lord! I shall never survive the shock!”