“Pardon me, Mr. Adrian,” Berry doubled his elbow to explain.  “Pardon me, sir.  Acting recipient of special injunctions I was not a free agent.”

“Go to Mr. Richard again, Berry.  There will be a little confusion if he holds back.  Perhaps you had better throw out a hint or so of apoplexy.  A slight hint will do.  And here—­Berry! when you return to town, you had better not mention anything—­to quote Johnson—­of Benson’s spiflication.”

“Certainly not, sir.”

The wise youth’s hint had the desired effect on Richard.

He dashed off a hasty letter by Tom to Belthorpe, and, mounting his horse, galloped to the Bellingham station.

Sir Austin was sitting down to a quiet early dinner at his hotel, when the Hope of Raynham burst into his room.

The baronet was not angry with his son.  On the contrary, for he was singularly just and self-accusing while pride was not up in arms, he had been thinking all day after the receipt of Benson’s letter that he was deficient in cordiality, and did not, by reason of his excessive anxiety, make himself sufficiently his son’s companion:  was not enough, as he strove to be, mother and father to him; preceptor and friend; previsor and associate.  He had not to ask his conscience where he had lately been to blame towards the System.  He had slunk away from Raynham in the very crisis of the Magnetic Age, and this young woman of the parish (as Benson had termed sweet Lucy in his letter) was the consequence.

Yes! pride and sensitiveness were his chief foes, and he would trample on them.  To begin, he embraced his son:  hard upon an Englishman at any time—­doubly so to one so shamefaced at emotion in cool blood, as it were.  It gave him a strange pleasure, nevertheless.  And the youth seemed to answer to it; he was excited.  Was his love, then, beginning to correspond with his father’s as in those intimate days before the Blossoming Season?

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?”