"To see your family rising about you thus, must afford you intense pleasure, Downie; but I cannot understand our friend Dick here at all. My years may not be many now, and I do not wish my hereditary estate to change hands often, or my lands to be scattered even after I am done with them."
"I do not comprehend your fears, my dear uncle," said Richard, smiling; "your estates can never lack heirs while God spares me—and then there is Downie——"
"And his son Audley the Hussar—you would say?"
"Exactly," replied Richard, but in a strange faint voice, and as he spoke he felt that the keen grey eyes of Downie were regarding him attentively by the waxen lights of the chandelier, which Mr. Jasper Funnel and two tall footmen had just illuminated, at the same time drawing the heavy curtains of crimson damask over the last flash of the setting sun, and the ruddy sea whose waves were rolling in blue and gold, between the bluffs of Land's End and the rocky Isles of Scilly.
"You cannot be a woman-hater, Dick?"
"No—far from it," replied Richard, as a soft expression stole over his manly face; "there can be no such thing in nature."
"The truth is—but take your wine—I strongly fear, that during your military peregrinations, you have got yourself entangled now—and unworthily perhaps."
"My lord—you are mistaken," replied Richard firmly—almost sternly; "but what causes you to think so?"
"Your so decidedly declining an introduction to General Trecarrel and his two daughters—the most beautiful girls in the duchy of Cornwall. They come of a good family too; and as the couplet has it:—
"'By Tre, Pol, and Pen,
Ye may know the Cornish men.'"