“I suppose you know what you are doing, sir.  I don’t see that we derive any advantage from the family name being made notorious for twenty years of obscene suffering, and becoming a byword for our constitutional tendency to stomachic distension before we fortunately encountered Quackem’s Pill.  My uncle’s tortures have been huge, but I would rather society were not intimate with them under their several headings.”  Adrian enumerated some of the most abhorrent.  “You know him, sir.  If he conceives a duty, he will do it in the face of every decency—­all the more obstinate because the conception is rare.  If he feels a little brisk the morning after the pill, he sends the letter that makes us famous!  We go down to posterity with heightened characteristics, to say nothing of a contemporary celebrity nothing less than our being turned inside-out to the rabble.  I confess I don’t desire to have my machinery made bare to them.”

Sir Austin assured the wise youth that Hippias had arranged to go to Dr. Bairam.  He softened Adrian’s chagrin by telling him that in about two weeks they would follow to London:  hinting also at a prospective Summer campaign.  The day was fixed for Richard to depart, and the day came.  Madame the Eighteenth Century called him to her chamber and put into his hand a fifty-pound note, as her contribution toward his pocket-expenses.  He did not want it, he said, but she told him he was a young man, and would soon make that fly when he stood on his own feet.  The old lady did not at all approve of the System in her heart, and she gave her grandnephew to understand that, should he require more, he knew where to apply, and secrets would be kept.  His father presented him with a hundred pounds—­which also Richard said he did not want—­he did not care for money.  “Spend it or not,” said the baronet, perfectly secure in him.

Hippias had few injunctions to observe.  They were to take up quarters at the hotel, Algernon’s general run of company at the house not being altogether wholesome.  The baronet particularly forewarned Hippias of the imprudence of attempting to restrict the young man’s movements, and letting him imagine he was under surveillance.  Richard having been, as it were, pollarded by despotism, was now to grow up straight, and bloom again, in complete independence, as far as he could feel.  So did the sage decree; and we may pause a moment to reflect how wise were his previsions, and how successful they must have been, had not Fortune, the great foe to human cleverness, turned against him, or he against himself.

The departure took place on a fine March morning.  The bird of Winter sang from the budding tree; in the blue sky sang the bird of Summer.  Adrian rode between Richard and Hippias to the Bellingham station, and vented his disgust on them after his own humorous fashion, because it did not rain and damp their ardour.  In the rear came Lady Blandish and the baronet, conversing on the calm summit of success.