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ON THE CLIFFS OF JERSEY.
Captain Anson Anstruther, A.D.

C., was the very happiest of men three days later, when he watched Madame Alixe Delavigne gracefully presiding over a pretty tea table, a la fusse, in the quaint old mansion, bowered in a garden sloping down to the Thames, where Miss Mildred Anstruther, a venerable maiden aunt, had her "local habitation and, a name!" A lonely woman of colossal wealth and blue blood, high in rank, and decidedly of riper years.
"By Jove! Dear old Aunt Mildred is a tower of strength to me, just now," reflected the gallant Captain, when, as the soft shadows deepened on lawn and river, he lingered tenderly there in explanation of his official business.

It was hardly "official" that Anson Anstruther had fallen into the habit of furtively addressing the now unveiled Madame Berthe Louison, as "Alixe", but it was even so.

Acquaintance can ripen as rapidly on the Thames as by the Arno, given a certain impetus.