Lord Lackington did not appear to listen.

“Are you a homoeopath?” he said, suddenly, rising to his full and immense stature and looking down with eagerness on Warkworth.

“No.  Why?”

“Because it’s your only chance, for those parts.  If Cecil Ray had had their medicines with him he’d be alive now.  Look here; when do you start?” The speaker took out his note-book.

“In rather less than a month I start for Denga.”

“All right.  I’ll send you a medicine-case—­from Epps.  If you’re ill, take ’em.”

“You’re very good.”

“Not at all.  It’s my hobby—­one of the last.”  A broad, boyish smile flashed over the handsome old face.  “Look at me; I’m seventy-five, and I can tire out my own grandsons at riding and shooting.  That comes of avoiding all allopathic messes like the devil.  But the allopaths are such mean fellows they filch all our ideas.”

The old man was off.  Warkworth submitted to five minutes’ tirade, stealing a glance sometimes at the group of Julie, Meredith, and Delafield in the farther window—­at the happy ease and fun that seemed to prevail in it.  He fiercely felt himself shut out and trampled on.

Suddenly, Lord Lackington pulled up, his instinct for declamation qualified by an equally instinctive dread of boring or being bored.  “What did you think of Montresor’s statement?” he said, abruptly, referring to a batch of army reforms that Montresor the week before had endeavored to recommend to a sceptical House of Commons.

“All very well, as far as it goes,” said Warkworth, with a shrug.

“Precisely!  We English want an army and a navy; we don’t like it when those fellows on the Continent swagger in our faces, and yet we won’t pay either for the ships or the men.  However, now that they’ve done away with purchase—­Gad!  I could fight them in the streets for the way in which they’ve done it!—­now that they’ve turned the army into an examination-shop, tempered with jobbery, whatever we do, we shall go to the deuce.  So it don’t matter.”

“You were against the abolition?”

“I was, sir—­with Wellington and Raglan and everybody else of any account.  And as for the violence, the disgraceful violence with which it was carried—­”

“Oh no, no,” said Warkworth, laughing.  “It was the Lords who behaved abominably, and it’ll do a deal of good.”

Lord Lackington’s eyes flashed.

“I’ve had a long life,” he said, pugnaciously.  “I began as a middy in the American war of 1812, that nobody remembers now.  Then I left the sea for the army.  I knocked about the world.  I commanded a brigade in the Crimea—­”

“Who doesn’t remember that?” said Warkworth, smiling.

The old man acknowledged the homage by a slight inclination of his handsome head.

“And you may take my word for it that this new system will not give you men worth a tenth part of those fellows who bought and bribed their way in under the old.  The philosophers may like it, or lump it, but so it is.”