’I confess I have been a little hurt with you, Harrington.  You left me stranded on the desert isle.  I thought myself abandoned.  I thought I should never see anything but the lengthening of an endless bill on my landlady’s face—­my sole planet.  I was resigned till I heard my friend “to-lool!” this morning.  He kindled recollection.  But, this is a tidy Port, and that was a delectable sort of young lady that you were riding with when we parted last!  She laughs like the true metal.  I suppose you know it ’s the identical damsel I met the day before, and owe it to for my run on the downs—­I ‘ve a compliment ready made for her.’

‘You think that letter written in good faith?’ said Evan.

‘Look here.’  Mr. Raikes put on a calmness.  ’You got up the other night, and said you were a tailor—­a devotee of the cabbage and the goose.  Why the notion didn’t strike me is extraordinary—­I ought to have known my man.  However, the old gentleman who gave the supper—­he’s evidently one of your beastly rich old ruffianly republicans—­spent part of his time in America, I dare say.  Put two and two together.’

But as Harrington desired plain, prose, Mr. Raikes tamed his imagination to deliver it.  He pointed distinctly at the old gentleman who gave the supper as the writer of the letter.  Evan, in return, confided to him his history and present position, and Mr. Raikes, without cooling to his fortunate friend, became a trifle patronizing.

’You said your father—­I think I remember at old Cudford’s—­was a cavalry officer, a bold dragoon?’

‘I did,’ replied Evan.  ‘I told a lie.’

‘We knew it; but we feared your prowess, Harrington.’

Then they talked over the singular letter uninterruptedly, and Evan, weak among his perplexities of position and sentiment:  wanting money for the girl up-stairs, for this distasteful comrade’s bill at the Green Dragon, and for his own immediate requirements, and with the bee buzzing of Rose in his ears:  ‘She despises you,’ consented in a desperation ultimately to sign his name to it, and despatch Jack forthwith to Messrs. Grist.

‘You’ll find it’s an imposition,’ he said, beginning less to think it so, now that his name was put to the hated monstrous thing; which also now fell to pricking at curiosity.  For he was in the early steps of his career, and if his lady, holding to pride, despised him—­as, he was tortured into the hypocrisy of confessing, she justly might, why, then, unless he was the sport of a farceur, here seemed a gilding of the path of duty:  he could be serviceable to friends.  His claim on fair young Rose’s love had grown in the short while so prodigiously asinine that it was a minor matter to constitute himself an old eccentric’s puppet.

‘No more an imposition than it’s 50 of Virgil,’ quoth the rejected usher.

‘It smells of a plot,’ said Evan.

’It ‘s the best joke that will be made in my time,’ said Mr. Raikes, rubbing his hands.