“Regret it, sir?” The question aroused one of those struggles in the young man’s breast which a passionate storm of tears may still, and which sink like leaden death into the soul when tears come not.  Richard’s eyes had the light of the desert.

“Do you?” his father repeated.  “You tempt me—­I almost fear you do.”  At the thought—­for he expressed his mind—­the pity that he had for Richard was not pure gold.

“Ask me what I think of her, sir!  Ask me what she is!  Ask me what it is to have taken one of God’s precious angels and chained her to misery!  Ask me what it is to have plunged a sword into her heart, and to stand over her and see such a creature bleeding!  Do I regret that?  Why, yes, I do!  Would you?”

His eyes flew hard at his father under the ridge of his eyebrows.

Sir Austin winced and reddened.  Did he understand?  There is ever in the mind’s eye a certain wilfulness.  We see and understand; we see and won’t understand.

“Tell me why you passed by her as you did this afternoon,” he said gravely:  and in the same voice Richard answered:  “I passed her because I could not do otherwise.”

“Your wife, Richard?”

“Yes! my wife!”

“If she had seen you, Richard?”

“God spared her that!”

Mrs. Doria, bustling in practical haste, and bearing Richard’s hat and greatcoat in her energetic hands, came between them at this juncture.  Dimples of commiseration were in her cheeks while she kissed her brother’s perplexed forehead.  She forgot her trouble about Clare, deploring his fatuity.

Sir Austin was forced to let his son depart.  As of old, he took counsel with Adrian, and the wise youth was soothing.  “Somebody has kissed him, sir, and the chaste boy can’t get over it.”  This absurd suggestion did more to appease the baronet than if Adrian had given a veritable reasonable key to Richard’s conduct.  It set him thinking that it might be a prudish strain in the young man’s mind, due to the System in difficulties.

“I may have been wrong in one thing,” he said, with an air of the utmost doubt of it.  “I, perhaps, was wrong in allowing him so much liberty during his probation.”

Adrian pointed out to him that he had distinctly commanded it.

“Yes, yes; that is on me.”

His was an order of mind that would accept the most burdensome charges, and by some species of moral usury make a profit out of them.

Clare was little talked of.  Adrian attributed the employment of the telegraph to John Todhunter’s uxorious distress at a toothache, or possibly the first symptoms of an heir to his house.

“That child’s mind has disease in it...  She is not sound,” said the baronet.

On the door-step of the hotel, when they returned, stood Mrs. Berry.  Her wish to speak a few words with the baronet reverentially communicated, she was ushered upstairs into his room.