The young man chuckled; but in a minute he pulled a long face, and made
big, ominous eyes.

"I feel I ought to warn you," he said in a portentous voice, "that some
of us are mere marquises--of the house of Carabas."

Lady Blanchemain, her whole expansive person, simmered with enjoyment.

"Bless you," she cried, "those are the ducalest, for marquises--of the
house of Carabas--are men of dash and spirit, born to bear everything
before them, and to marry the King's daughter."

With that, she had a moment of abstraction. Again, her eyeglass up, she
glanced round the walls--hung, in this octagonal room, with dim-coloured
portraits of women, all in wonderful toilets, with wonderful hair and
head-gear, all wonderfully young and pleased with things, and all four
centuries dead. They caused her a little feeling of uneasiness, they
were so dead and silent, and yet somehow, in their fixed postures, with
their unblinking eyes, their unvarying smiles, so--as it seemed to
her--so watchful, so intent; and it was a relief to turn from them to
the window, to the picture framed by the window of warm, breathing,
heedless nature. But all the while, in her interior mind, she was busy
with the man before her. "He looks," she considered, "tall as he is, and
with his radiant blondeur--with the gold in his hair and beard, and the
sea-blue in his eyes--he looks like a hero out of some old Norse saga.
He looks like-what's his name?--like Odin. I must really compel him to
explain himself."

It very well may be, meantime, that he was reciprocally busy with her,
taking her in, admiring her, this big, jolly, comely, high-mannered old