“There is no engagement,” Edward wrote; “let the maiden wait and discern her choice:  let her ripen;” and he quoted Horace up to a point.

Nor could his father help smiling and completing the lines.  He laughed, too, as he read the jog of a verse:  “Were I to marry the Gosling, pray, which would be the goose?”

He laughed, but with a shade of disappointment in the fancy that he perceived a wearing away of the robust mental energy which had characterized his son:  and Sir William knew the danger of wit, and how the sharp blade cuts the shoots of the sapling.  He had thought that Edward was veritable tough oak, and had hitherto encouraged his light play with the weapon.

It became a question with him now, whether Wit and Ambition may dwell together harmoniously in a young man:  whether they will not give such manifestation of their social habits as two robins shut in a cage will do:  of which pretty birds one will presently be discovered with a slightly ruffled bosom amid the feathers of his defunct associate.

Thus painfully revolving matters of fact and feeling, Sir William cantered, and, like a cropped billow blown against by the wind, drew up in front of Mrs. Lovell, and entered into conversation with that lady, for the fine needles of whose brain he had the perfect deference of an experienced senior.  She, however, did not give him comfort.  She informed him that something was wrong with Edward; she could not tell what.  She spoke of him languidly, as if his letters contained wearisome trifling.

“He strains to be Frenchy,” she said.  “It may be a good compliment for them to receive:  it’s a bad one for him to pay.”

“Alcibiades is not the best of models,” murmured Sir William.  “He doesn’t mention Miss Gosling.”

“Oh dear, yes.  I have a French acrostic on her name.”

“An acrostic!”

A more contemptible form of mental exercise was not to be found, according to Sir William’s judgement.

“An acrostic!” he made it guttural.  “Well!”

“He writes word that he hears Moliere every other night.  That can’t harm him.  His reading is principally Memoirs, which I think I have heard you call ‘The backstairs of history.’  We are dull here, and I should not imagine it to be a healthy place to dwell in, if the absence of friends and the presence of sunshine conspire to dullness.  Algy, of course, is deep in accounts to-day?”

Sir William remarked that he had not seen the young man at the office, and had not looked for him; but the mention of Algernon brought something to his mind, and he said,—­

“I hear he is continually sending messengers from the office to you during the day.  You rule him with a rod of iron.  Make him discontinue that practice.  I hear that he despatched our old porter to you yesterday with a letter marked ‘urgent.’”

Mrs. Lovell laughed pleadingly for Algernon.