“No pleading!”

“When I’ve vowed upon my eloquence, Willoughby, I’d bring you to pardon the poor dog?”

“Not a word of him!”

“Just one!”

Sir Willoughby battled with himself to repress a state of temper that put him to marked disadvantage beside his friend Horace in high spirits.  Ordinarily he enjoyed these fits of Irish of him, which were Horace’s fun and play, at times involuntary, and then they indicated a recklessness that might embrace mischief.  De Craye, as Willoughby had often reminded him, was properly Norman.  The blood of two or three Irish mothers in his line, however, was enough to dance him, and if his fine profile spoke of the stiffer race, his eyes and the quick run of the lip in the cheek, and a number of his qualities, were evidence of the maternal legacy.

“My word has been said about the man,” Willoughby replied.

“But I’ve wagered on your heart against your word, and cant afford to lose; and there’s a double reason for revoking for you!”

“I don’t see either of them.  Here are the ladies.”

“You’ll think of the poor beast, Willoughby.”

“I hope for better occupation.”

“If he drives a wheelbarrow at the Hall he’ll be happier than on board a chariot at large.  He’s broken-hearted.”

“He’s too much in the way of breakages, my dear Horace.”

“Oh, the vase! the bit of porcelain!” sung De Craye.  “Well, we’ll talk him over by and by.”

“If it pleases you; but my rules are never amended.”

“Inalterable, are they?—­like those of an ancient people, who might as well have worn a jacket of lead for the comfort they had of their boast.  The beauty of laws for human creatures is their adaptability to new stitchings.”

Colonel De Craye walked at the heels of his leader to make his bow to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.

Sir Willoughby had guessed the person who inspired his friend Horace to plead so pertinaciously and inopportunely for the man Flitch:  and it had not improved his temper or the pose of his rejoinders; he had winced under the contrast of his friend Horace’s easy, laughing, sparkling, musical air and manner with his own stiffness; and he had seen Clara’s face, too, scanning the contrast—­he was fatally driven to exaggerate his discontentment, which did not restore him to serenity.  He would have learned more from what his abrupt swing round of the shoulder precluded his beholding.  There was an interchange between Colonel De Craye and Miss Middleton; spontaneous on both sides.  His was a look that said:  “You were right”; hers:  “I knew it”.  Her look was calmer, and after the first instant clouded as by wearifulness of sameness; his was brilliant, astonished, speculative, and admiring, pitiful:  a look that poised over a revelation, called up the hosts of wonder to question strange fact.