‘No, sure!’ said I.  ’That would but have been to make the trouble thicker.  We were certainly in a very ill posture.’

‘You do not yet appreciate how grave it was,’ he replied.  ’It was necessary for you that your cousin should go, and go at once.  You yourself had to leave to-night under cover of darkness, and how could you have done that with the Viscount in the next room?  He must go, then; he must leave without delay.  And that was the difficulty.’

’Pardon me, Mr. Romaine, but could not my uncle have bidden him go?’ I asked.

’Why, I see I must tell you that this is not so simple as it sounds,’ he replied.  ’You say this is your uncle’s house, and so it is.  But to all effects and purposes it is your cousin’s also.  He has rooms here; has had them coming on for thirty years now, and they are filled with a prodigious accumulation of trash—­stays, I dare say, and powder-puffs, and such effeminate idiocy—­to which none could dispute his title, even suppose any one wanted to.  We had a perfect right to bid him go, and he had a perfect right to reply, “Yes, I will go, but not without my stays and cravats.  I must first get together the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine chestsfull of insufferable rubbish, that I have spent the last thirty years collecting—­and may very well spend the next thirty hours a-packing of.”  And what should we have said to that?’

‘By way of repartee?’ I asked.  ’Two tall footmen and a pair of crabtree cudgels, I suggest.’

‘The Lord deliver me from the wisdom of laymen!’ cried Romaine.  ’Put myself in the wrong at the beginning of a lawsuit?  No, indeed!  There was but one thing to do, and I did it, and burned my last cartridge in the doing of it.  I stunned him.  And it gave us three hours, by which we should make haste to profit; for if there is one thing sure, it is that he will be up to time again to-morrow in the morning.’

‘Well,’ said I, ’I own myself an idiot.  Well do they say, an old soldier, an old innocent!  For I guessed nothing of all this.’

‘And, guessing it, have you the same objections to leave England?’ he inquired.

‘The same,’ said I.

‘It is indispensable,’ he objected.

‘And it cannot be,’ I replied.  ’Reason has nothing to say in the matter; and I must not let you squander any of yours.  It will be enough to tell you this is an affair of the heart.’

‘Is it even so?’ quoth Romaine, nodding his head.  ’And I might have been sure of it.  Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in yellow overalls, do what you will, young Jessamy finds young Jenny.  O, have it your own way; I am too old a hand to argue with young gentlemen who choose to fancy themselves in love; I have too much experience, thank you.  Only, be sure that you appreciate what you risk:  the prison, the dock, the gallows, and the halter—­ terribly vulgar circumstances, my young friend; grim, sordid, earnest; no poetry in that!’