His drawl was perfect, and his
eye-glass as bright--as his wits.
In his outer pocket, he carried a little plush card-case, stuffed with
little printed visiting cards, on whose immaculate surface, the
name--Mr. Sylvester Davenport Clyde--lay in conscious dignity and
beauty. Away down in the left hand corner, like a parenthetical
guarantee of Mr. Clyde's imposing social standing, was neatly
inscribed--Portland Place, London, England.
Mr. Sylvester Davenport Clyde, of Portland Place, London, England, a
pleasure tourist in Canada, with a (figurative) mortgage on every town
he visited, and a claim on the hand of one of Canada's fairest
daughters.
It would be too hazardous of me, perhaps to declare that he had no
claim upon her heart, but with the most perfect sanction of the most
scrupulous discretion, I can safely avow, that she never loved him,
for she owned to me, she did not. She laughed most boisterously at
him, when he took his maiden snow-shoe tramp, and actually displeased
him with her ridicule, when he came up the toboggan hill after an
unfortunate slide, making strenuous efforts to shake the wet snow from
under his stiff, linen cuffs; his yellow gloves were sadly spoiled,
and his eye-glass broken; his hat was injured by being blown off in
the descent, and there were other still more grievous consequences
which need not be mentioned, since the mercy of the darkness kept them
from the general view.
She married him, however, before he returned to Portland Place.
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