“Really,” Mrs. Doria said to her intimates, “that boy’s education acts like a disease on him.  He cannot regard anything sensibly.  He is for ever in some mad excess of his fancy, and what he will come to at last heaven only knows!  I sincerely pray that Austin will be able to bear it.”

Threats of prayer, however, that harp upon their sincerity, are not very well worth having.  Mrs. Doria had embarked in a practical controversy, as it were, with her brother.  Doubtless she did trust he would be able to bear his sorrows to come, but one who has uttered prophecy can barely help hoping to see it fulfilled:  she had prophecied much grief to the baronet.

Poor John Todhunter, who would rather have married the mother, and had none of your heroic notions about the sacred necessity for love in marriage, moved as one guiltless of offence, and deserving his happiness.  Mrs. Doria shielded him from the hero.  To see him smile at Clare’s obedient figure, and try not to look paternal, was touching.

Meantime Clare’s marriage served one purpose.  It completely occupied Richard’s mind, and prevented him from chafing at the vexation of not finding his father ready to meet him when he came to town.  A letter had awaited Adrian at the hotel, which said, “Detain him till you hear further from me.  Take him about with you into every form of society.”  No more than that.  Adrian had to extemporize, that the baronet had gone down to Wales on pressing business, and would be back in a week or so.  For ulterior inventions and devices wherewith to keep the young gentleman in town, he applied to Mrs. Doria.  “Leave him to me,” said Mrs. Doria, “I’ll manage him.”  And she did.

“Who can say,” asks The Pilgrim’s Scrip, “when he is not walking a puppet to some woman?”

Mrs. Doria would hear no good of Lucy.  “I believe,” she observed, as Adrian ventured a shrugging protest in her behalf,—­“it is my firm opinion, that a scullery-maid would turn any of you men round her little finger—­only give her time and opportunity.”  By dwelling on the arts of women, she reconciled it to her conscience to do her best to divide the young husband from his wife till it pleased his father they should live their unhallowed union again.  Without compunction, or a sense of incongruity, she abused her brother and assisted the fulfilment of his behests.

So the puppets were marshalled by Mrs. Doria, happy, or sad, or indifferent.  Quite against his set resolve and the tide of his feelings, Richard found himself standing behind Clare in the church—­the very edifice that had witnessed his own marriage, and heard, “I, Clare Doria, take thee John Pemberton,” clearly pronounced.  He stood with black brows dissecting the arts of the tailor and hairdresser on unconscious John.  The back, and much of the middle, of Mr. Todhunter’s head was bald; the back shone like an egg-shell, but across the middle the artist had drawn two long dabs of hair from the sides, and