‘You labour under a false impression, Mr. Romaine,’ said I.  ’I have no impatience to figure in the dock.  I am even as anxious as yourself to postpone my first appearance there.  On the other hand, I have not the slightest intention of leaving this country, where I please myself extremely.  I have a good address, a ready tongue, an English accent that passes, and, thanks to the generosity of my uncle, as much money as I want.  It would be hard indeed if, with all these advantages, Mr. St. Ives should not be able to live quietly in a private lodging, while the authorities amuse themselves by looking for Champdivers.  You forget, there is no connection between these two personages.’

‘And you forget your cousin,’ retorted Romaine.  ’There is the link.  There is the tongue of the buckle.  He knows you are Champdivers.’  He put up his hand as if to listen.  ’And, for a wager, here he is himself!’ he exclaimed.

As when a tailor takes a piece of goods upon his counter, and rends it across, there came to our ears from the avenue the long tearing sound of a chaise and four approaching at the top speed of the horses.  And, looking out between the curtains, we beheld the lamps skimming on the smooth ascent.

‘Ay,’ said Romaine, wiping the window-pane that he might see more clearly.  ’Ay, that is he by the driving!  So he squanders money along the king’s highway, the triple idiot! gorging every man he meets with gold for the pleasure of arriving—­where?  Ah, yes, where but a debtor’s jail, if not a criminal prison!’

‘Is he that kind of a man?’ I said, staring on these lamps as though I could decipher in them the secret of my cousin’s character.

‘You will find him a dangerous kind,’ answered the lawyer.  ’For you, these are the lights on a lee shore!  I find I fall in a muse when I consider of him; what a formidable being he once was, and what a personable! and how near he draws to the moment that must break him utterly! we none of us like him here; we hate him, rather; and yet I have a sense—­I don’t think at my time of life it can be pity—­but a reluctance rather, to break anything so big and figurative, as though he were a big porcelain pot or a big picture of high price.  Ay, there is what I was waiting for!’ he cried, as the lights of a second chaise swam in sight.  ’It is he beyond a doubt.  The first was the signature and the next the flourish.  Two chaises, the second following with the baggage, which is always copious and ponderous, and one of his valets:  he cannot go a step without a valet.’

‘I hear you repeat the word big,’ said I.  ’But it cannot be that he is anything out of the way in stature.’