'Beauty, do you know, or do you not know, that a whist-table is not to be taken as you take a timber in a hunting-field, on the principle of clear it or smash it ?' 'Faith!' said Bertie, 'clear it or smash it is a very good rule for anything, but a trifle too energetic for me.'" "The deuce, he's had enough of 'smashing' at last! I wish he hadn't come to grief in that style; it's a shocking bore for the Guards--such an ugly story." "It was uncommonly like him to get killed just when he did--best possible taste." "Only thing he could do." "Better taste would have been to do it earlier.

I always wondered he stopped for the row." "Oh, never thought it would turn up; trusted to a fluke." He whom the Punjaub knew as the Sword of the Evil One, but who held in polite society the title of Lord Kergenven, drank some hock slowly, and murmured as his sole quota to the conversation, very lazily and languidly: "Bet you he isn't dead at all." "The deuce you do?
And why ?" chorused the table; "when a fellow's body's found with all his traps round him!" "I don't believe he's dead," murmured Kergenven with closed, slumberous eyes.
"But why?
Have you heard anything ?" "Not a word." "Why do you say he's alive, then ?" My lord lifted his brows ever so little.
"I think so, that's all." "But you must have a reason, Ker ?" Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, and dropped out slowly, in the mellowest voice in the world, the following: "It don't follow one has reasons for anything; pray don't get logical.
Two years ago I was out in a chasse au sanglier, central France; perhaps you don't know their work?
It's uncommonly queer.

Break up the Alps into little bits, scatter 'em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set a killing pack to hunt through and through it.

Delightful chance for coming to grief; even odds that if you don't pitch down a ravine, you'll get blinded for life by a branch; that if you don't get flattened under a boulder, you'll be shot by a twig catching your rifle-trigger.
Uncommonly good sport." Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms of the venerie and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a walnut into some Regency sherry.
"Hang it, Ker!" cried the Dauphin.

"What's that to do with Beauty ?" My lord let fall a sleepy glance of surprise and of rebuke from under his black lashes, that said mutely, "Do I, who hate talking, ever talk wide of any point ?" "Why, this," he murmured.