“Second only to Sir John Moore!”
“’Tis easy to jeer! If you knew Sir John as I do——”
“Nay, but Jack—nay, you need not be vexed with me,” protested Molly. “I did not jeer truly. And ’tis a fact that when last I saw and spoke with Sir John, he brought to my mind the thought of Denham. Not that the two have the same face or the same way, but that both are soldierly and tall, and each holds his head as stately as a prince. And for the matter of Sir John Moore—why, I am proud of him as ever you can be.”
Jack nodded slightly, mollified at once by her apologetic tone. His gaze returned to Polly.
“And for the matter of Denham,” Molly continued, dropping her voice once more, “he has been always as a brother to me; and it would go hard with me to believe any ill of him. Yet—I wonder often that no letter comes from him to Polly. And Polly watches and grieves, I know, though she says little, and will not talk of him. Sure, if he had writ to her often, one letter now and again would find its way hither.”
“Who can say? But I would distrust the post and Boney a thousand times, before ever I would doubt Ivor,” Jack answered firmly. “And Polly, if indeed she knows him, sure would feel the same. He is no man to change.”
“Nor, I think, is Polly the girl to change—either!”
“In this brilliant assemblage of rank and fashion, though lightened by the fire of genius and radiant with feminine charms, there is for me but one star of greatest magnitude, before which all lesser orbs fade into insignificance.”
So spoke Captain Albert Peirce in the ears of Polly Keene; and he felt that he had expressed himself with the utmost elegance. Gentlemen in those days were prone to more flowing speech than they are in these; and such speeches did not necessarily mean much.
Ninety years later the grandson or great-grandson of Captain Peirce would merely drag his moustache, and mutter, “Awfully pretty girl!” But the two modes of expression, though rather unlike, probably implied and imply much the same in the end.