Telfer was an only son, and when he heard it reported that his father intended to give him a _belle-mère_ in a young lady as attractive as she was poor, who, if she caught him, would probably make a fool of the old gentleman in the widest sense of the word, he naturally swore very heartily, and anything but relished the idea. Hamilton Telfer, senior, had certainly been a good deal with Violet that season, and Violet, a girl poor as a rat and beautiful as Semele, talked to him, and sang to him, and rode with him more than she did with any of us; so people talked and talked, and said the old member would get caught, and the Major, when he heard it, waxed fiercely wroth at the folly his parent had fallen into while he'd been off the scene down at Dover with his troop, but, like a wise man, said nothing, knowing, both by experience and observation, that opposition in such affairs is like a patent Vesta among hayricks. Telfer was a particular chum of mine: we'd lounged about town, and shot on the moors, and campaigned in India together, and I don't believe there was a better soldier, a cooler head, a quicker eye, or a steadier hand in the service than he was. He was six-and-thirty now, and had seen life pretty well, I can tell you, for there was not a get-at-able corner of the globe that he hadn't looked at through his eye-glass. Tall and muscular, with a stern, handsome face, with the prospect of Torwood (where there's some of the best shooting in England, I give you my word), and 15,000_l._ a year, Telfer was a great card in the matrimonial line, but hadn't let himself be played as yet, for the petty trickery the women used in trying to get him dealt to them disgusted him, and small wonder. Men liked him cordially, women thought him cold and sarcastic; and he was much more genial, I admit, at mess, or at lansquenet, or in the smoking-room of the U. S., than he was in boudoirs and ball-rooms, as the mere knowledge that mammas and their darlings were trying to hook him made him get on his stilts at once.
"I don't feel easy in my mind about the governor," said he, as we drove along to the South-Eastern Station a few days after on our way to Essellau. "As I was bidding him good-bye this morning, Soames brought him a letter in a woman's hand. Heaven knows he may have a score of fair correspondents for anything I care, but if I thought it was the Tressillian, devil take her----"