“How about the Colonel?” asked Dicky, in a voice louder than he intended; for, as he spoke, a figure some little distance ahead of them, on the other side of the street, stopped and turned.
“Talk of the d——!” said Lauriston, in a low voice.
Massey, much dismayed, looked ready to take refuge in flight.
“Let’s go back and turn down the first street,” he murmured, his brogue coming out strongly in his excitement. “There’s a kind of court-martial look about his left eye that makes him a worse person to face than one’s tailor at Christmas-time.”
“Nonsense!” said Lauriston. “Don’t be a fool, Massey. He’s in an angelic temper this evening; and he’s not half a bad fellow at any time.”
“Not to you—you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and if you were to blow up an arsenal you would get off with a ‘severe censure.’ But I’m not so lucky.”
However, he was persuaded to walk on; and in the meantime the dreaded Colonel was crossing the street to meet the young men. He was a small spare man, who from the other side of the road looked insignificant, but who seemed to grow in height and importance as he came closer, until, when face to face with you, he had the dignity and imposing appearance of six feet two. A sabre-cut over his left eye had drawn up the eyebrow in a manner which gave an odd expression to his weather-beaten and prematurely old features, and imparted additional intensity to the gaze of a pair of piercing blue-gray eyes, which looked out from his thin, rugged face like the guns from a concealed battery. His expression, however, as he drew near the young men, was one of such mitigated ferocity as passed in him for amiability, and the grating tones of his voice were charged with as little harshness as the unmusical nature of the organ permitted.
“Who is that calling on the Colonel?” he asked, turning to keep pace with them in an unexpected and unwelcome access of sociability.
Colonel Lord Florencecourt was an Irishman, and his countryman, finding him in a softer mood than usual, plucked up his native audacity.
“They were running down love and the ladies, Colonel, and I was calling upon all true Irishmen to help me to support their cause.”