"Why, no, my dear colonel. Don't you remember? _It's your own_!"

"Ah, so it is! I had quite forgotten." And general laughter and applause
would burst forth at such a natural mistake on the part of our
great man.

Well, I could neither play nor sing, and found it far easier by this
time to speak English than French, especially to English people who were
ignorant of any language but their own. Yet sometimes Colonel Ibbetson
would seem quite proud of me.

"Deux metres, bien sonnes!" he would say, alluding to my stature, "et le
profil d'Antinoues!" which he would pronounce without the two little dots
on the _u_.

And afterwards, if he had felt his evening a pleasant one, if he had
sung all he knew, if Mrs. Deane had been more than usually loving and
self-surrendering, and I had distinguished myself by skilfully turning
over the leaves when her mother had played the piano, he would tell me,
as we walked home together, that I "did credit to his name, and that I
would make an excellent figure in the world as soon as I had _decrasse_
myself; that I must get another dress-suit from his tailor, just an
eighth of an inch longer in the tails; that I should have a commission
in his old regiment (the Eleventeenth Royal Bounders), a deuced crack
cavalry regiment; and see the world and break a few hearts (it is not
for nothing that our friends have pretty wives and sisters); and finally
marry some beautiful young heiress of title, and make a home for him
when he was a poor solitary old fellow. Very little would do for him: a
crust of bread, a glass of wine and water, and a clean napkin, a couple