"You see, until one has broken one's neck, the excitement of the thing isn't totally worn out; can't be, naturally, because the--what-do-you-call-it ?--consummation isn't attained till then.

The worst of it is, it's getting commonplace, getting vulgar; such a number break their necks, doing Alps and that sort of thing, that we shall have nothing at all left to ourselves soon." "Not even the monopoly of sporting suicide! Very hard," said her ladyship, with the lowest, most languid laugh in the world, very like "Beauty's" own, save that it had a considerable indication of studied affectation, of which he, however much of a dandy he was, was wholly guiltless.

"Well! you won magnificently; that little black man, who is he?
Lancers, somebody said ?--ran you so fearfully close.

I really thought at one time that the Guards had lost." "Do you suppose that a man happy enough to wear Lady Guenevere's colors could lose?
An embroidered scarf given by such hands has been a gage of victory ever since the days of tournaments!" murmured Cecil with the softest tenderness, but just enough laziness in the tone and laughter in the eye to make it highly doubtful whether he was not laughing both at her and at himself, and was wondering why the deuce a fellow had to talk such nonsense.

Yet she was Lady Guenevere, with whom he had been in love ever since they stayed together at Belvoir for the Croxton Park week the autumn previous; and who was beautiful enough to make their "friendship" as enchanting as a page out of the "Decamerone." And while he bent over her, flirting in the fashion that made him the darling of the drawing-rooms, and looking down into her superb Velasquez eyes, he did not know, and if he had known would have been careless of it, that afar off, while with rage, and with his gaze straining on to the course through his race-glass, Ben Davis, "the welsher," who had watched the finish--watched the "Guards' Crack" landed at the distance--muttered, with a mastiff's savage growl: "He wins, does he?
Curse him! The d----d swell--he shan't win long.".