As when nations are secretly preparing for war, the docks and arsenals hammer night and day, and busy contractors measure time by inches, and the air hums around:  for leagues as it were myriads of bees, so the house and neighbourhood of the matrimonial soft one resounded in the heroic style, and knew little of the changes of light decreed by Creation.  Mrs. Berry was the general of the hour.  Down to Doctors’ Commons she expedited the hero, instructing him how boldly to face the Law, and fib:  for that the Law never could mist a fib and a bold face.  Down the hero went, and proclaimed his presence.  And lo! the Law danced to him its sedatest lovely bear’s-dance.  Think ye the Lawless susceptible to him than flesh and blood?  With a beautiful confidence it put the few familiar questions to him, and nodded to his replies:  then stamped the bond, and took the fee.  It must be an old vagabond at heart that can permit the irrevocable to go so cheap, even to a hero.  For only mark him when he is petitioned by heroes and heroines to undo what he does so easily!  That small archway of Doctors’ Commons seems the eye of a needle, through which the lean purse has a way, somehow, of slipping more readily than the portly; but once through, all are camels alike, the lean purse an especially big camel.  Dispensing tremendous marriage as it does, the Law can have no conscience.

“I hadn’t the slightest difficulty,” said the exulting hero.

“Of course not!” returns Mrs. Berry.  “It’s as easy, if ye’re in earnest, as buying a plum bun.”

Likewise the ambassador of the hero went to claim the promise of the Church to be in attendance on a certain spot, on a certain day, and there hear oath of eternal fealty, and gird him about with all its forces:  which the Church, receiving a wink from the Law, obsequiously engaged to do, for less than the price of a plum-cake.

Meantime, while craftsmen and skilled women, directed by Mrs. Berry, were toiling to deck the day at hand, Raynham and Belthorpe slept,—­the former soundly; and one day was as another to them.  Regularly every morning a letter arrived from Richard to his father, containing observations on the phenomena of London; remarks (mainly cynical) on the speeches and acts of Parliament; and reasons for not having yet been able to call on the Grandisons.  They were certainly rather monotonous and spiritless.  The baronet did not complain.  That cold dutiful tone assured him there was no internal trouble or distraction.  “The letters of a healthful physique!” he said to Lady Blandish, with sure insight.  Complacently he sat and smiled, little witting that his son’s ordeal was imminent, and that his son’s ordeal was to be his own.  Hippias wrote that his nephew was killing him by making appointments which he never kept, and altogether neglecting him in the most shameless way, so that his ganglionic centre was in a ten times worse state than when he left Raynham.  He wrote very bitterly, but it was hard to feel compassion for his offended stomach.