“Handsome!” cried Sir Norman, lighting up with quite a new sensation at the recollection. “I tell you handsome doesn't begin to describe her! She is beautiful, lovely, angelic, divine—” Here Sir Norman's litany of adjectives beginning to give out, he came to a sudden halt, with a face as radiant as the sky at sunrise.
“Ah! I did not believe them, when they told me she was so much like me; but if she is as near perfection as you describe, I shall begin to credit it. Strange, is it not, that nature should make a duplicate of her greatest earthly chef d'oeuvre?”
“You conceited young jackanapes!” growled Sir Norman, in deep displeasure. “It is far stranger how such a bundle of vanity can contrive to live in this work-a-day world. You are a foreigner, I perceive?”
“Yes, Sir Norman, I am happy to say I am.”
“You don't like England, then?”
“I'd be sorry to like it; a dirty, beggarly, sickly place as I ever saw!”
Sir Norman eyed the slender specimen of foreign manhood, uttering this sentiment in the sincerest of tones, and let his hand fall heavily on his shoulder.
“My good youth, be careful! I happen to be a native, and not altogether used to this sort of talk. How long have you been here? Not long, I know myself—at least, not in the Earl of Rochester's service, or I would have seen you.”
“Right! I have not been here a month; but that month has seemed longer than a year elsewhere. Do you know, I imagine when the world was created, this island of yours must have been made late on Saturday night, and then merely thrown in from the refuse to fill up a dent in the ocean.”
Sir Norman paused in his walk, and contemplated the speaker a moment in severest silence. But Master Hubert only lifted up his saucy face and laughing black eyes, in dauntless sang froid.