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 behind the teapot. The popular traveller had turned to wave a farewell; and behold! he was no other than my cousin Alain. It was a change of the sharpest from the angry, pallid man I had seen at Amershain Place. Ruddy to a fault, illuminated with vintages, crowned with his curls like Bacchus, he now stood before me for an instant, the perfect master of himself, smiling with airs of conscious popularity and insufferable condescension. He reminded me at once of a royal duke, of an actor turned a little elderly, and of a blatant bagman who should have been the illegitimate son of a gentleman. A moment after he was gliding noiselessly on the road to London.

I breathed again. I recognised, with heartfelt gratitude, how lucky I had been to go in by the stable-yard instead of the hostelry door, and what a fine occasion of meeting my cousin I had lost by the purchase of the claret-coloured chaise! The next moment I remembered that there was a waiter present. No doubt but he must have observed me when I crouched behind the breakfast equipage; no doubt but he must have commented on this unusual and undignified behaviour; and it was essential that I should do something to remove the impression.

"Waiter!" said I, "that was the nephew of Count Carwell that just drove off, wasn't it?"

"Yes, sir: Viscount Carwell we calls him," he replied. "Ah, I thought as much," said I. "Well, well, damn all these Frenchmen, say I!"

"You may so indeed, sir," said the waiter. "They ain't not to say in the same field with our 'ome-raised gentry."

"Nasty tempers?" I suggested.

"Beas'ly temper, sir, the Viscount 'ave," said the waiter with feeling. "Why, no longer agone than this morning, he was sitting breakfasting and reading in his