In the abortive, unsatisfactory attempt to follow out one fluctuating clue, not without whiteness, and heaving often upwards, but frail, wavering, ravelled, and tangled, so that scarcely could he find one line that held together, Louis awoke to find his father wondering that he could sleep with the sun shining full on his face.

‘It was hardly quite a dream,’ said Louis, as he related it to Mrs. Frost.

‘It would make a very pretty allegory.’

‘It is too real for that just now,’ he said.  ’It was the moral of all my broken strands that Mary held up to me yesterday.’

’I hope you are going to do more than point your moral, my dear.  You always were good at that.’

‘I mean it,’ said Louis, earnestly.  ’I do not believe such an illness—­ay, or such a dream—­can come for nothing.’

So back went his thoughts to the flaws in his own course; and chiefly he bewailed his want of sympathy for his father.  Material obedience and submission had been yielded, but, having little cause to believe himself beloved, his heart had never been called into action so as to soften the clashings of two essentially dissimilar characters.  Instead of rebelling, or even of murmuring, he had hid disappointment in indifference, taken refuge in levity and versatility, and even consoled himself by sporting with what he regarded as prejudice or unjust displeasure.  All this cost him much regret and self-reproach at each proof of the affection so long veiled by reserve.  Never would he have given pain, had he guessed that his father could feel; but he had grown up to imagine the whole man made up of politics and conventionalities, and his new discoveries gave him at least as much contrition as pleasure.

After long study of the debates, that morning, his father prepared to write.  Louis asked for the paper, saying his senses would just serve for the advertisements, but presently he made an exclamation of surprise at beholding, in full progress, the measure which had brought Sir Miles Oakstead to Ormersfield, one of peculiar interest to the Earl.  His blank look of wonder amused Mrs. Ponsonby, but seemed somewhat to hurt his father.

‘You did not suppose I could attend to such matters now?’ he said.

‘But I am so much better!’

Fearing that the habit of reserve would check any exchange of feeling, Mrs. Ponsonby said, ’Did you fancy your father could not think of you except upon compulsion?’

‘I beg your pardon, father,’ said Louis, smiling, while a tear rose to his eyes, ’I little thought I was obstructing the business of the nation.  What will Sir Miles do to me?’

‘Sir Miles has written a most kind and gratifying letter,’ said Lord Ormersfield, ’expressing great anxiety for you, and a high opinion of your powers.’

Louis had never heard of his own powers, except for mischief, and the colour returned to his cheeks, as he listened to the kind and cordial letter, written in the first shock of the tidings of the accident.  He enjoyed the pleasure it gave his father far more than the commendation to himself; for he well knew, as he said, that ’there is something embellishing in a catastrophe,’ and he supposed ’that had driven out the rose-coloured pastor.’