Adrian resumed the procession of the cake.

He sighted his melancholy uncle Algernon hunting an appetite in the Row, and looking as if the hope ahead of him were also one-legged.  The Captain did not pass with out querying the ungainly parcel.

“I hope I carry it ostentatiously enough?” said Adrian.

“Enclosed is wherewithal to quiet the alarm of the land.  Now may the maids and wives of Merry England sleep secure.  I had half a mind to fix it on a pole, and engage a band to parade it.  This is our dear Richard’s wedding-cake.  Married at half-past eleven this morning, by licence, at the Kensington parish church; his own ring being lost he employed the ring of his beautiful bride’s lachrymose land-lady, she standing adjacent by the altar.  His farewell to you as a bachelor, and hers as a maid, you can claim on the spot if you think proper, and digest according to your powers.”

Algernon let off steam in a whistle.  “Thompson, the solicitor’s daughter!” he said.  “I met them the other day, somewhere about here.  He introduced me to her.  A pretty little baggage.

“No.”  Adrian set him right. “’Tis a Miss Desborough, a Roman Catholic dairymaid.  Reminds one of pastoral England in the time of the Plantagenets!  He’s quite equal to introducing her as Thompson’s daughter, and himself as Beelzebub’s son.  However, the wild animal is in Hymen’s chains, and the cake is cut.  Will you have your morsel?”

“Oh, by all means!—­not now.”  Algernon had an unwonted air of reflection.—­“Father know it?”

“Not yet.  He will to-night by nine o’clock.”

“Then I must see him by seven.  Don’t say you met me.”  He nodded, and pricked his horse.

“Wants money!” said Adrian, putting the combustible he carried once more in motion.

The women were the crowning joy of his contemplative mind.  He had reserved them for his final discharge.  Dear demonstrative creatures!  Dyspepsia would not weaken their poignant outcries, or self-interest check their fainting fits.  On the generic woman one could calculate.  Well might The Pilgrim’s Scrip say of her that, “She is always at Nature’s breast”; not intending it as a compliment.  Each woman is Eve throughout the ages; whereas the Pilgrim would have us believe that the Adam in men has become warier, if not wiser; and weak as he is, has learnt a lesson from time.  Probably the Pilgrim’s meaning may be taken to be, that Man grows, and Woman does not.

At any rate, Adrian hoped for such natural choruses as you hear in the nursery when a bauble is lost.  He was awake to Mrs. Doria’s maternal predestinations, and guessed that Clare stood ready with the best form of filial obedience.  They were only a poor couple to gratify his Mephistophelian humour, to be sure, but Mrs. Doria was equal to twenty, and they would proclaim the diverse ways with which maidenhood and womanhood took disappointment, while the surrounding Forey girls and other females of the family assembly were expected to develop the finer shades and tapering edges of an agitation to which no woman could be cold.