Mr. Thompson cast the wicked creature down with a “Pah!” He, however, took her up again, and strode away with her.  Sir Austin gave Ripton a forefinger, and kindly touched his head, saying, “Good-bye, boy!  At some future date Richard will be happy to see you at Raynham.”

Undoubtedly this was a great triumph to the System!

CHAPTER XVII

The conversation between solicitor and client was resumed.

“Is it possible,” quoth Mr. Thompson, the moment he had ushered his client into his private room, “that you will consent, Sir Austin, to see him and receive him again?”

“Certainly,” the baronet replied.  “Why not?  This by no means astonishes me.  When there is no longer danger to my son he will be welcome as he was before.  He is a schoolboy.  I knew it.  I expected it.  The results of your principle, Thompson!”

“One of the very worst books of that abominable class!” exclaimed the old lawyer, opening at the coloured frontispiece, from which brazen Miss Random smiled bewitchingly out, as if she had no doubt of captivating Time and all his veterans on a fair field.  “Pah!” he shut her to with the energy he would have given to the office of publicly slapping her face; “from this day I diet him on bread and water—­rescind his pocket-money!—­How he could have got hold of such a book!  How he—!  And what ideas!  Concealing them from me as he has done so cunningly!  He trifles with vice!  His mind is in a putrid state!  I might have believed—­I did believe—­I might have gone on believing—­my son Ripton to be a moral young man!” The old lawyer interjected on the delusion of fathers, and sat down in a lamentable abstraction.

“The lad has come out!” said Sir Austin.  “His adoption of the legal form is amusing.  He trifles with vice, true:  people newly initiated are as hardy as its intimates, and a young sinner’s amusements will resemble those of a confirmed debauchee.  The satiated, and the insatiate, appetite alike appeal to extremes.  You are astonished at this revelation of your son’s condition.  I expected it; though assuredly, believe me, not this sudden and indisputable proof of it.  But I knew that the seed was in him, and therefore I have not latterly invited him to Raynham.  School, and the corruption there, will bear its fruits sooner or later.  I could advise you, Thompson, what to do with him:  it would be my plan.”

Mr. Thompson murmured, like a true courtier, that he should esteem it an honour to be favoured with Sir Austin Feverel’s advice:  secretly resolute, like a true Briton, to follow his own.

“Let him, then,” continued the baronet, “see vice in its nakedness.  While he has yet some innocence, nauseate him!  Vice, taken little by little, usurps gradually the whole creature.  My counsel to you, Thompson, would be, to drag him through the sinks of town.”

Mr. Thompson began to blink again.