The first difficulty, of course, was to make him talk at all.  Aldous tried various sporting “gambits” with very small success.  At last, by good-luck, the boy rose to something like animation in describing an encounter he had had the week before with a piebald weasel in the course of a morning’s ferreting.

“All at once we saw the creature’s head poke out of the hole—­pure white, with a brown patch on it.  When it saw us, back it scooted!—­and we sent in another ferret after the one that was there already.  My goodness! there was a shindy down in the earth—­you could hear them rolling and kicking like anything.  We had our guns ready,—­but all of a sudden everything stopped—­not a sound or a sign of anything!  We threw down our guns and dug away like blazes.  Presently we came on the two ferrets gorging away at a dead rabbit,—­nasty little beasts!—­that accounted for them; but where on earth was the weasel?  I really began to think we had imagined the creature, when, whish! came a flash of white lightning, and out the thing bolted—­pure white with a splash of brown—­its winter coat, of course.  I shot at it, but it was no go.  If I’d only put a bag over the hole, and not been an idiot, I should have caught it.”

The boy swung along, busily ruminating for a minute or two, and forgetting his trouble.

“I’ve seen one something like it before,” he went on—­“ages ago, when I was a little chap, and Harry Wharton and I were out rabbiting.  By the way—­” he stopped short—­“do you see that that fellow’s come back?”

“I saw the paragraph in the Times this morning,” said Aldous, drily.

“And I’ve got a letter from Fanny this morning, to say that he and Lady Selina are to be married in July, and that she’s going about making a martyr and a saint of him, talking of the ‘persecution’ he’s had to put up with, and the vulgar fellows who couldn’t appreciate him, and generally making an ass of herself.  Oh! he won’t ask any of us to his wedding—­trust him.  It is a rum business.  You know Willie Ffolliot—­that queer dark fellow—­that used to be in the 10th Hussars—­did all those wild things in the Soudan?”

“Yes—­slightly.”

“I heard all about it from him.  He was one of that gambling set at Harry’s club there’s been all that talk about you know, since Harry came to grief.  Well!—­he was going along Piccadilly one night last summer, quite late, between eleven and twelve, when Harry caught hold of him from behind.  Willie thought he was out of his mind, or drunk.  He told me he never saw anybody in such a queer state in his life.  ’You come along with me,’ said Harry, ‘come and talk to me, or I shall shoot myself!’ So Willie asked him what was up.  ‘I’m engaged to be married,’ said Harry.  Whereupon Willie remarked that, considering his manner and his appearance, he was sorry for the young lady. ‘Young!’ said Harry as though he would have knocked him down.