Under two flags Author:Ouida Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: glass, Ben Davis, " the Welcher," who had watched the finish—watched the " Guards' Crack " landed at the distance—muttered, with a mastiff's savage growl: " H... more »e wins, does he ? Curse him ! The d—d swell—he shan't win long." CHAPTER IV. LO E A LA MODE. Life was very pleasant at Royallieu. It lay in the Melton country, and was equally well placed for Pytchley, Quorn, and Belvoir, besides possessing ita own small but very perfect pack of " little ladies," or the "demoiselles," as they were severally nicknamed; the game was closely preserved, pheasants were fed on Indian corn till they were the finest birds in the country, and in the little winding paths of the elder and bilberry coverts thirty first-rate shots, with two loading-men to each, could find flock and feather to amnse them till dinner, with rocketers and warm corners enough to content the most insatiate of knickerbockered gunners. The stud was superb; the cook, a French artist of consummate genius, who had a brougham to his own use, and wore diamonds 01 the first water; in the broad beech-studded grassy lands no lesser thing than doe and deer ever swept through the taickfcrns in the sunlight and the shadow; a retinue of powdered servants filled the old halls, and guests of highest degree dined in its stately banqueting-room, with its scarlet and gold, its Vandykes and its Vernets, and yet—there was terribly little money at Royallieu with it all. Its present luxury was purchased at the cost of the future, and the parasite of extravagance was constantly sapping, unseen, the gallant old Norman-planted oak of the family-tree. But then, who thought of that ? Nobody. It was the way of the House never to take count of the morrow. True, any one of them would have died a hundred deaths rathzr than have had one acre ...« less