The bronzed, weather worn face of Telford showed
imperturbable, but his eyes were struggling with a strong kind of humor.
The officer flushed to the hair, accepted the grapes, smiled foolishly,
and acknowledged--swallowing the reflection on his accent--that he had
been in Paris. Then he engaged in close conversation with the young lady
beside him, who, however, seemed occupied with Telford. This quiet, keen
young lady, Miss Mildred Margrave, had received an impression, not of the
kind which her sex confide to each other, but of a graver quality. She
was a girl of sympathies and parts.
The event increased the interest and respect felt in the hotel for this
stranger. That he knew French was not strange. He had been well educated
as a boy and had had his hour with the classics. His godmother, who had
been in the household of Prince Joseph Bonaparte, taught him French from
the time he could lisp, and, what was dangerous in his father's eyes,
filled him with bits of poetry and fine language, so that he knew Heine,
Racine and Beranger and many another. But this was made endurable to the
father by the fact that, by nature, the boy was a warrior and a
scapegrace, could use his fists as well as his tongue, and posed as a
Napoleon with the negro children in the plantation.
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