“Dear me!” said Miss Stapylton; “how interesting!”

Then she yawned with deliberate cruelty.

“However,” she concluded, “I shall call you Olaf, just the same.”

“Er—­h’m!” said the colonel.

* * * * *

And this stuttering boor (he reflected) was Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, confessedly the social triumph of his generation!  This imbecile, without a syllable to say for himself, without a solitary adroit word within tongue’s reach, wherewith to annihilate the hussy, was a Musgrave of Matocton!

* * * * *

And she did.  To her he was “Olaf” from that day forth.

Rudolph Musgrave called her, “You.”  He was nettled, of course, by her forwardness—­“Olaf,” indeed!—­yet he found it, somehow, difficult to bear this fact in mind continuously.

For while it is true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall in love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily employed with other matters to have much time to profit by current literature.  Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic.  She prefers to jog along in the old rut, contentedly turning out chromolithographic sunrises such as they give away at the tea stores, contentedly staging the most violent and improbable melodramas; and—­sturdy old Philistine that she is—­she even now permits her children to fall in love in the most primitive fashion.

She is not particularly interested in subtleties and soul analyses; she merely chuckles rather complacently when a pair of eyes are drawn, somehow, to another pair of eyes, and an indescribable something is altered somewhere in some untellable fashion, and the world, suddenly, becomes the most delightful place of residence in all the universe.  Indeed, it is her favorite miracle, this.  For at work of this sort the old Philistine knows that she is an adept; and she has rejoiced in the skill of her hands, with a sober workmanly joy, since Cain first went a-wooing in the Land of Nod.

So Colonel Rudolph Musgrave, without understanding what had happened to him, on a sudden was strangely content with life.

It was at supper—­dinner, in Lichfield, when not a formal entertainment, is eaten at two in the afternoon—­that he fell a-speculating as to whether Her eyes, after all, could be fitly described as purple.

Wasn’t there a grayer luminosity about them than he had at first suspected?—­wasn’t the cool glow of them, in a word, rather that of sunlight falling upon a wet slate roof?

It was a delicate question, an affair of nuances, of almost imperceptible graduations; and in debating a matter of such nicety, a man must necessarily lay aside all petty irritation, such as being nettled by an irrational nickname, and approach the question with unbiased mind.

He did.  And when, at last, he had come warily to the verge of decision, Miss Musgrave in all innocence announced that they would excuse him if he wished to get back to his work.