He had never approved of Frank altogether; he didn’t quite like the queer kinds of things that Frank did; for Frank’s reputation at Merefield was very much what it was at Cambridge.  He did ridiculous and undignified things.  As a small boy, he had fought at least three pitched battles in the village, and that was not a proper thing for a Guiseley to do.  He liked to go out with the keepers after poachers, and Dick, very properly, asked himself what keepers were for except to do that kind of thing for you?  There had been a bad row here, too, scarcely eighteen months ago; it had been something to do with a horse that was ill-treated, and Frank had cut a very absurd and ridiculous figure, getting hot and angry, and finally thrashing a groom, or somebody, with his own hands, and there had been uncomfortable talk about police-courts and actions for assault.  Finally, he had fallen in love with, proposed to, and become engaged to, Jenny Launton.  That was an improper thing for a younger son to do, anyhow, at his age, and Dick now perceived that the fact that Jenny was Jenny aggravated the offense a hundredfold.  And, last of all, he had become a Catholic—­an act of enthusiasm which seemed to Dick really vulgar.

Altogether, then, Frank was not a satisfactory person, and it would do him no harm to have a little real discipline at last....

* * * * *

It was the striking of midnight from the stable clock that woke Dick up from his deep reverie, and was the occasion of his perceiving that he had come to no conclusion about anything, except that Frank was an ass, that Jenny was—­well—­Jenny, and that he, Dick, was an ill-used person.

I do not like to set down here, even if I could, all the considerations that had passed through Dick’s mind since a quarter-past eleven, simply because the very statement of them would give a false impression.  Dick was not a knave, and he did not deceive himself about himself more than most of us do.  Yet he had considered a number of points that, strictly speaking, he ought not to have considered.  He had wondered whether Frank would die; he had wondered whether, if he did not, Lord Talgarth would really be as good as his word; and, if so, what effect that would have on Jenny.  Finally, he had wondered, with a good deal of intellectual application, what exactly Jenny had meant when she had announced all that about the telegram she was going to send in Lord Talgarth’s name, and the letter she was going to send in her own. (He had asked Archie just now in the smoking-room, and he, too, had confessed himself beaten.  Only, he had been quite sure that jenny would get her way and obtain Frank’s forgiveness.)

Also, in the course of his three-quarters of an hour he had considered, for perhaps the hundredth time since he had come to the age of discretion, what exactly three lives between a man and a title stood for.  Lord Talgarth was old and gouty; Archie was not married, and showed no signs of it; and Frank—­well, Frank was always adventurous and always in trouble.