remarkable things.'

'He must have been the spirit of the storm,' said Lady Everingham.

'Charles Verney has a great deal of dark hair,' said Lady Theresa. 'But
then he is anything but pale, and his eyes are blue.'

'And certainly he keeps his wonderful things for your ear, Theresa,' said
her sister.

'I wish that Mr. Coningsby would tell us some of the wonderful things he
said,' said the Duchess, smiling.

'Take a glass of wine first with my mother, Coningsby,' said Henry Sydney,
who had just finished helping them all to fish.

Coningsby had too much tact to be entrapped into a long story. He already
regretted that he had been betrayed into any allusion to the stranger. He
had a wild, fanciful notion, that their meeting ought to have been
preserved as a sacred secret. But he had been impelled to refer to it in
the first instance by the chance observation of Lady Everingham; and he
had pursued his remark from the hope that the conversation might have led
to the discovery of the unknown. When he found that his inquiry in this
respect was unsuccessful, he was willing to turn the conversation. In
reply to the Duchess, then, he generally described the talk of the
stranger as full of lively anecdote and epigrammatic views of life; and
gave them, for example, a saying of an illustrious foreign Prince, which
was quite new and pointed, and which Coningsby told well. This led to a
new train of discourse. The Duke also knew this illustrious foreign
Prince, and told another story of him; and Lord Everingham had played