"Keep your counsel for your own use, Syd. You put me in mind of the philanthropist, who ran to warn his neighbor of the dangers of soot while his own chimney was on fire."
"As how? I don't quite see the point of your parable," said Vivian, with an expression of such innocent impassiveness that one would have thought he had never seen her fair face out of her furs in her sledge, or admired her small ankles when she was skating on the Ontario.
The winter before, a brother of mine, who was out there in the Rifles, wrote and asked me to go and have some buffalo-hunting, and Vivian went out with me for a couple of months. We had some very good sport in the western woods and plains, and his elk and bison horns are still stuck up in Vivian's rooms at Uxbridge, with many another trophy of both hemispheres. We had sport of another kind, too, to the merry music of the silvery sledge-bells, over the crisp snow and the gleaming ice, while bright eyes shone on us under delicate lace veils, and little feet peeped from under heaps of sable and bearskin, and gay voices rang out in would-be fear when the horses shied at the shadow of themselves, or at the moon shining on the ice. Who thinks of Canada without in fancy hearing the ringing chimes of the gay sledge bells swinging joyous measure into the clear sunshine or the white moonlight, in tune with light laughter, and soft whispers, and careless hearts?
There we saw Cecil St. Aubyn, one of the prettiest girls in Toronto, then about nineteen. My brother Harry was mad about her, so were almost all the men in the Canada Rifles, and Engineers, and, 61st that were quartered there; and Vivian admired her too, though in a calmer sort of way. Perhaps if he had been with her more than a fortnight he might have gone further. As it was, he left Toronto liking her long Canadian eyes no more than was pleasant. It was as well so, perhaps, for it would not have been a good match for him, St. Aubyn being a broken-down gambler, who, having lost a princely fortune at Crocky's, and the Bads, married at fifty a widow with a little money, and migrated to Toronto, where he was a torment to himself and to everybody else. Vivian, meanwhile, was a great matrimonial _coup_. Coming of a high county family, and being the only son, of course there was priceless value set on his life, which, equally, of course, he imperilled, after the manner of us all, in every way he could--in charges and skirmishes, yachting, hunting, and steeple-chasing--ever since some two-and-twenty years ago he joined as a cornet of fifteen--a man already in muscle and ideas, pleasures and pursuits.