of, and consisting of grilled lake-trout with cucumber, followed by curd-fritters crowned with dabs of whortleberry preserve, did not constitute a flagrant breach of the rules of dietary drawn up by the London specialist under whose advice he was trying the Zeiden whey-cure for a dyspepsia induced by Suffragist Demonstrations and the Revised Budget Estimate. “Quite so, yes!”

[Pg 5]

“You are trying to be cynical,” said the little lady, who was serious and high-minded, and Member of half-a-dozen Committees of Societies for the moral and physical improvement of a world that would infinitely prefer to remain as it is “Skeptics may sneer,” she continued with energy, “and the irreverent scoff, but a holy life does stamp itself upon the countenance in lines there is no mistaking.”

“I did not sneer,” retorted her husband, whose internal system the unfortuitous combination of cucumber with curds was rapidly upsetting. “Nor am I aware that I scoffed. Your saintly-faced old gentleman is certainly a very interesting and remarkable personage. His name is M. Hector Dunoisse.” He added, with an inflection the direct result of the cucumber-curd-whortleberry combination: “He was a natural son of the First Napoleon’s favorite aide-de-camp, a certain Colonel—afterwards Field-Marshal Dunoisse (who did tremendous things at Aboukir and Austerlitz and Borodino)—by—ah!—by a Bavarian lady of exalted rank,—a professed nun, in fact,—who ran away with Dunoisse, or was run away with. M. Pédelaborde, the man who told me the story, doesn’t profess to be quite certain.”

“I dare say not! And who is M. Pédelaborde, if I may be allowed to know?”

Infinite contempt and unbounded incredulity were conveyed in the little English lady’s utterance of the foregoing words.

“Pédelaborde,” explained her husband, sucking a soda-mint lozenge, and avoiding the wifely eye, “is the fat, tremendously-mustached personage who conducts the Kursaal Band.”

“Indeed!”

“He has known M. Hector Dunoisse all his life—Pédelaborde’s life, I mean, of course. His father was a fellow-cadet of your old gentleman’s at a Military Training Institute[Pg 6] in Paris, where Dunoisse fought a duel with another boy and killed him, I am given to understand, by an unfair thrust. The French are fond of tricks in fencing, and some of ’em are the very dev——Ahem!”

[Pg 6]

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