SENTENCE OF EXILE.


After the dinner at Heatherly, John Saltram came very often to the
cottage. He did not care much for the fellows who were staying with Sir
David this year, he told Gilbert. He knew all Major Foljambe's tiger
stories by heart, and had convicted him of glaring discrepancies in his
description of the havoc he and his brother officers had made among the
big game. Windus Carr was a conceited presuming cad, who was always
boring them with impossible accounts of his conquests among the fair sex;
and that poor Harker was an unmitigated fool, whose brains had run into
his billiard-cue. This was the report which John Saltram gave of his
fellow-guests; and he left the shooting-party morning after morning to go
out boating with Gilbert and Marian, or to idle away the sunny hours on
the lawn listening to the talk of the two others, and dropping in a word
now and then in a sleepy way as he lay stretched on the grass near them,
looking up to the sky, with his arms crossed above his head.

He called at Lidford House one day when Gilbert had told him he should
stay at home to write letters, and was duly presented to the Listers, who
made a little dinner-party in his honour a few days afterwards, to which
Captain Sedgewick and Marian were invited--a party which went off with
more brightness and gaiety than was wont to distinguish the Lidford House
entertainments. After this there was more boating--long afternoons spent
on the winding river, with occasional landings upon picturesque little
islands or wooded banks, where there were the wild-flowers Marian Nowell
loved and understood so well; more idle mornings in the cottage garden--a
happy innocent break in the common course of life, which seemed almost as
pleasant to John Saltram as to his friend. He had contrived to make
himself popular with every one at Lidford, and was an especial favourite