All the puppets then rolled off to the breakfast.

Adrian hurried after Richard in an extremely discontented state of mind.  Not to be at the breakfast and see the best of the fun, disgusted him.  However, he remembered that he was a philosopher, and the strong disgust he felt was only expressed in concentrated cynicism on every earthly matter engendered by the conversation.  They walked side by side into Kensington Gardens.  The hero was mouthing away to himself, talking by fits.

Presently he faced Adrian, crying:  “And I might have stopped it!  I see it now!  I might have stopped it by going straight to him, and asking him if he dared marry a girl who did not love him.  And I never thought of it.  Good heaven!  I feel this miserable affair on my conscience.”

“Ah!” groaned Adrian.  “An unpleasant cargo for the conscience, that!  I would rather carry anything on mine than a married couple.  Do you purpose going to him now?”

The hero soliloquized:  “He’s not a bad sort of man."...

“Well, he’s not a Cavalier,” said Adrian, “and that’s why you wonder your aunt selected him, no doubt?  He’s decidedly of the Roundhead type, with the Puritan extracted, or inoffensive, if latent.”

“There’s the double infamy!” cried Richard, “that a man you can’t call bad, should do this damned thing!”

“Well, it’s hard we can’t find a villain.”

“He would have listened to me, I’m sure.”

“Go to him now, Richard, my son.  Go to him now.  It’s not yet too late.  Who knows?  If he really has a noble elevated superior mind—­though not a Cavalier in person, he may be one at heart—­he might, to please you, and since you put such stress upon it, abstain...perhaps with some loss of dignity, but never mind.  And the request might be singular, or seem so, but everything has happened before in this world, you know, my dear boy.  And what an infinite consolation it is for the eccentric, that reflection!”

The hero was impervious to the wise youth.  He stared at him as if he were but a speck in the universe he visioned.

It was provoking that Richard should be Adrian’s best subject for cynical pastime, in the extraordinary heterodoxies he started, and his worst in the way he took it; and the wise youth, against his will, had to feel as conscious of the young man’s imaginative mental armour, as he was of his muscular physical.

“The same sort of day!” mused Richard, looking up.  “I suppose my father’s right.  We make our own fates, and nature has nothing to do with it.”

Adrian yawned.

“Some difference in the trees, though,” Richard continued abstractedly.

“Growing bald at the top,” said Adrian.

“Will you believe that my aunt Helen compared the conduct of that wretched slave Clare to Lucy’s, who, she had the cruel insolence to say, entangled me into marriage?” the hero broke out loudly and rapidly.  “You know—­I told you, Adrian—­how I had to threaten and insist, and how she pleaded, and implored me to wait.”