Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/32

 Malletort, what advantages you possess, and how unconscious you seem of them!"

"Advantages!" repeated the Abbé, musing. Well, perhaps you are right. Handsome women are the court-cards of the game, if a man knows how to play them. It is a grand game, too, and the stakes are well worth winning. Yet I sometimes think if I had foreseen in time how entirely you must devote body and soul to play it, I might never have sat down at all. I could almost envy a boy, like that merry page who passed us with my baby-cousin—a boy, whose only thought or care is to spend the time gaily now, and wear a sword as soon as his beard is grown hereafter."

"The boy will carry a sword fairly enough," answered Florian; "for he looks like a little adventurer already. Who is he? I have remarked him amongst the others for a certain bold bearing, that experience and sorrow alone will, I fear, be able to tame."

"It will take a good deal of both to tame any of that family," answered Malletort; "and this young game-chick will no doubt prove himself of the same feather as the rest of the brood when his spurs are grown. He's a Hamilton, Florian; a Hamilton from the other side of the water, with a cross of the wildest blood in France or Europe in his veins. You believe the old monkish chronicles—I don't. They will tell you that boy's direct ancestor went up the breach at Acre in front of Cœur de Lion—an Englishman of the true pig-headed type, who had sense enough, however, to hate his vassal ever after for being a bigger fool than himself. On the mother's side he comes of a race that can boast all its sons brave, and its daughters—well, its daughters—very much the same as other people's daughters. The result of so much fighting and gasconading being, simply, that the elder branch of the family is sadly impoverished, while the younger is irretrievably ruined."

"And this lad?" asked Florian, interested in the boy, perhaps because the page's character was in some respects so completely the reverse of his own.

"Is of the younger branch," continued Malletort, "and given over body and soul to the cause of this miserable family, whose head died, not half-a-dozen years ago, under