But when Richard, inarticulate at first in his haste, cried out, “My dear, dear father!  You are safe!  I feared—­You are better, sir?  Thank God!” Sir Austin stood away from him.

“Safe?” he said.  “What has alarmed you?”

Instead of replying, Richard dropped into a chair, and seized his hand and kissed it.

Sir Austin took a seat, and waited for his son to explain.

“Those doctors are such fools!” Richard broke out.  “I was sure they were wrong.  They don’t know headache from apoplexy.  It’s worth the ride, sir, to see you.  You left Raynham so suddenly.—­But you are well!  It was not an attack of real apoplexy?”

His father’s brows contorted, and he said, No, it was not.  Richard pursued: 

“If you were ill, I couldn’t come too soon, though, if coroners’ inquests sat on horses, those doctors would be found guilty of mare-slaughter.  Cassandra’ll be knocked up.  I was too early for the train at Bellingham, and I wouldn’t wait.  She did the distance in four hours and three-quarters.  Pretty good, sir, wasn’t it?”

“It has given you appetite for dinner, I hope,” said the baronet, not so well pleased to find that it was not simple obedience that had brought the youth to him in such haste.

“I’m ready,” replied Richard.  “I shall be in time to return by the last train to-night.  I will leave Cassandra in your charge for a rest.”

His father quietly helped him to soup, which he commenced gobbling with an eagerness that might pass for appetite.

“All well at Raynham?” said the baronet.

“Quite, sir.”

“Nothing new?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“The same as when I left?”

“No change whatever!”

“I shall be glad to get back to the old place,” said the baronet.  “My stay in town has certainly been profitable.  I have made some pleasant acquaintances who may probably favour us with a visit there in the late autumn—­people you may be pleased to know.  They are very anxious to see Raynham.”

“I love the old place,” cried Richard.  “I never wish to leave it.”

“Why, boy, before I left you were constantly begging to see town.”

“Was I, sir?  How odd!  Well!  I don’t want to remain here.  I’ve seen enough of it.”

“How did you find your way to me?”

Richard laughed, and related his bewilderment at the miles of brick, and the noise, and the troops of people, concluding, “There’s no place like home!”

The baronet watched his symptomatic brilliant eyes, and favoured him with a double-dealing sentence—­

“To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half traversed the world, is youth’s foolishness, my son.  Reverence time!  A better maxim that than your Horatian.”

“He knows all!” thought Richard, and instantly drew away leagues from his father, and threw up fortifications round his love and himself.