His eyebrows shot up.  That ill-omened man Flitch had sidled round by the bushes to within a few feet of him.  Flitch primarily defended himself against the accusation of drunkenness, which was hurled at him to account for his audacity in trespassing against the interdict; but he admitted that he had taken “something short” for a fortification in visiting scenes where he had once been happy—­at Christmastide, when all the servants, and the butler at head, grey old Mr. Chessington, sat in rows, toasting the young heir of the old Hall in the old port wine!  Happy had he been then, before ambition for a shop, to be his own master and an independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire:—­to look back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh for the smell of Patterne stables:  sweeter than Arabia, his drooping nose appeared to say.

He held up close against it something that imposed silence on Sir Willoughby as effectively as a cunning exordium in oratory will enchain mobs to swallow what is not complimenting them; and this he displayed secure in its being his licence to drivel his abominable pathos.  Sir Willoughby recognized Clara’s purse.  He understood at once how the must have come by it:  he was not so quick in devising a means of stopping the tale.  Flitch foiled him.  “Intact,” he replied to the question:  “What have you there?” He repeated this grand word.  And then he turned to Mrs. Mountstuart to speak of Paradise and Adam, in whom he saw the prototype of himself:  also the Hebrew people in the bondage of Egypt, discoursed of by the clergymen, not without a likeness to him.

“Sorrows have done me one good, to send me attentive to church, my lady,” said Flitch, “when I might have gone to London, the coachman’s home, and been driving some honourable family, with no great advantage to my morals, according to what I hear of.  And a purse found under the seat of a fly in London would have a poor chance of returning intact to the young lady losing it.”

“Put it down on that chair; inquiries will be made, and you will see Sir Willoughby,” said Mrs. Mountstuart.  “Intact, no doubt; it is not disputed.”

With one motion of a finger she set the man rounding.

Flitch halted; he was very regretful of the termination of his feast of pathos, and he wished to relate the finding of the purse, but he could not encounter Mrs. Mountstuart’s look; he slouched away in very close resemblance to the ejected Adam of illustrated books.

“It’s my belief that naturalness among the common people has died out of the kingdom,” she said.

Willoughby charitably apologized for him.  “He has been fuddling himself.”

Her vigilant considerateness had dealt the sensitive gentleman a shock, plainly telling him she had her ideas of his actual posture.  Nor was he unhurt by her superior acuteness and her display of authority on his grounds.

He said, boldly, as he weighed the purse, half tossing it:  “It’s not unlike Clara’s.”