“And uncle,” she stipulated in turn, “they are not to see me yet.  Very soon; but not yet.  Be true to me, and come alone, or it will be your fault—­I shall not appear.  Now, mind.  And beg them not to leave the farm.  It will kill father.  Can you not,” she said, in the faded sweetness of her speech, “could you not buy it, and let father be your tenant, uncle?  He would pay you regularly.”

Anthony turned a rough shoulder on her.

“Good-bye, Dahly.  You be a good girl, and all ’ll go right.  Old farmer talks about praying.  If he didn’t make it look so dark to a chap, I’d be ready to fancy something in that.  You try it.  You try, Dahly.  Say a bit of a prayer to-night.”

“I pray every night,” Dahlia answered.

Her look of meek despair was hauntingly sad with Anthony on his way home.

He tracked her sorrowfulness to the want of money; and another of his terrific vague struggles with the money-demon set in.

CHAPTER XXVI

Sir William Blancove did business at his Bank till the hour of three in the afternoon, when his carriage conveyed him to a mews near the park of Fashion, where he mounted horse and obeyed the bidding of his doctor for a space, by cantering in a pleasant, portly, cock-horsey style, up and down the Row.

It was the day of the great race on Epsom Downs, and elderly gentlemen pricked by the doctors were in the ascendant in all London congregations on horseback.

Like Achilles (if the bilious Shade will permit the impudent comparison), they dragged their enemy, Gout, at their horses’ heels for a term, and vengeance being accomplished went to their dinners and revived him.

Sir William was disturbed by his son’s absence from England.  A youth to whom a baronetcy and wealth are to be bequeathed is an important organism; and Sir William, though his faith reposed in his son, was averse to his inexplicably prolonged residence in the French metropolis, which, a school for many things, is not a school for the study of our Parliamentary system, and still less for that connubial career Sir William wished him to commence.

Edward’s delightful cynical wit—­the worldly man’s profundity—­and his apt quotations of the wit of others, would have continued to exercise their charm, if Sir William had not wanted to have him on the spot that he might answer certain questions pertinaciously put by Mama Gosling on behalf of her daughter.

“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.