Arthur did not delay his departure from Madeira.  The morning following Mildred’s ball he embarked on board a Portuguese boat, a very dirty craft which smelt of garlic and rancid oil, and sailed for Lisbon.  He arrived there safely, and mooned about that city for a while, himself a monument of serious reflections, and then struck across into Spain, where he spent a month or so inspecting the historical beauties of that fallen country.  Thence he penetrated across the Pyrenees into Southern France, which was pleasant in the spring months.  Here he remained another month, meeting with no adventures worthy of any note, and improving his knowledge of the French language.  Tiring at last of this, he travelled to Paris, and went to the theatres, but found his own thoughts too absorbing to allow of his taking any keen interest in their sensationalisms; so, after a brief stay, he made his way up to Brittany and Normandy, and went in for inspecting old castles and cathedrals, and finally ended up his continental travels by spending a week on the island rock of Saint Michel.

This place pleased him more than any he had visited.  He liked to wander about among the massive granite pillars of that noble ecclesiastical fortress, and at night to watch the phosphoric tide come rushing in with all the speed of a race-horse, over the wide sands, which separate it from the mainland.  There the thirty-first day of May found him, and he bethought him that it was time to return to London and see about getting the settlements drawn and ordering the wedding bouquet.  To speak the truth, he thought more about the bouquet than the settlements.

He arrived in London on the first of June, and went to see his family lawyer, a certain Mr. Borley, who had been solicitor to the trust during his minority.

“Bless me, Heigham, how like your father you have grown!” said that legal gentleman, as soon as Arthur was ensconced in the client’s chair —­a chair that, had it been endowed with the gift of speech, could have told some surprising stories.  “It seems only the other day that he was sitting there dictating the terms of his will, and yet that was before the Crimean war, more than twenty years ago.  Well, my boy, what is it?”

Arthur, thus encouraged, entered into a rather blundering recital of the circumstances of his engagement.

Mr. Borley did not say much, but, from his manner and occasional comments, it was evident that he considered the whole story very odd—­ regarding it, indeed, with some suspicion.

“I must tell you frankly, Mr. Heigham,” he said, at last, “I don’t quite understand this business.  The young lady, no doubt, is charming —­young ladies, looking at them from my clients’ point of view, always are—­but I can’t say I like your story about her father.  Why did you not tell me all this before?  I might then have been able to give you some advice worth having, or, at any rate, to make a few confidential” —­he laid great emphasis on the word “confidential”—­“inquiries.”