dregs; and it was to no purpose.  Still they floated before him, brimmed, trebly bitter.  Away from Austin’s influence, he was almost the same boy who had slipped the guinea into Tom Bakewell’s hand, and the lucifers into Farmer Blaize’s rick.  For good seed is long ripening; a good boy is not made in a minute.  Enough that the seed was in him.  He chafed on his road to Raynham at the scene he had just endured, and the figure of Belthorpe’s fat tenant burnt like hot copper on the tablet of his brain, insufferably condescending, and, what was worse, in the right.  Richard, obscured as his mind’s eye was by wounded pride, saw that clearly, and hated his enemy for it the more.

Heavy Benson’s tongue was knelling dinner as Richard arrived at the Abbey.  He hurried up to his room to dress.  Accident, or design, had laid the book of Sir Austin’s aphorisms open on the dressing-table.  Hastily combing his hair, Richard glanced down and read—­

     “The Dog returneth to his vomit:  the Liar must eat his Lie.”

Underneath was interjected in pencil:  “The Devil’s mouthful!”

Young Richard ran downstairs feeling that his father had struck him in the face.

Sir Austin marked the scarlet stain on his son’s cheekbones.  He sought the youth’s eye, but Richard would not look, and sat conning his plate, an abject copy of Adrian’s succulent air at that employment.  How could he pretend to the relish of an epicure when he was painfully endeavouring to masticate The Devil’s mouthful?

Heavy Benson sat upon the wretched dinner.  Hippias usually the silent member, as if awakened by the unnatural stillness, became sprightly, like the goatsucker owl at night and spoke much of his book, his digestion, and his dreams, and was spared both by Algernon and Adrian.  One inconsequent dream he related, about fancying himself quite young and rich, and finding himself suddenly in a field cropping razors around him, when, just as he had, by steps dainty as those of a French dancing-master, reached the middle, he to his dismay beheld a path clear of the blood, thirsty steel-crop, which he might have taken at first had he looked narrowly; and there he was.

Hippias’s brethren regarded him with eyes that plainly said they wished he had remained there.  Sir Austin, however, drew forth his note-book, and jotted down a reflection.  A composer of aphorisms can pluck blossoms even from a razor-prop.  Was not Hippias’s dream the very counterpart of Richard’s position?  He, had he looked narrowly, might have taken the clear path:  he, too, had been making dainty steps till he was surrounded by the grinning blades.  And from that text Sir Austin preached to his son when they were alone.  Little Clare was still too unwell to be permitted to attend the dessert, and father and son were soon closeted together.