’Harrington, I give in; I surrender; you reduce me to prose.  Thy nine have conquered my nine!—­pardon me, old fellow.  I’m immensely upset.  This is the first day in my life that I ever felt what indigestion is.  Egad, I’ve got something to derange the best digestion going!

’Look here, Harrington.  What happened to you today, I declare I think nothing of.  You owe me your assistance, you do, indeed; for if it hadn’t been for the fearful fascinations of your sister—­that divine Countess—­ I should have been engaged to somebody by this time, and profited by the opportunity held out to me, and which is now gone.  I ’m disgraced.  I ’m known.  And the worst of it is, I must face people.  I daren’t turn tail.  Did you ever hear of such a dilemma?’

‘Ay,’ quoth Evan, ‘what is it?’

Raikes turned pale.  ‘Then you haven’t heard of it?’ ‘Not a word.’

’Then it’s all for me to tell.  I called on Messrs. Grist.  I dined at the Aurora afterwards.  Depend upon it, Harrington, we’re led by a star.  I mean, fellows with anything in them are.  I recognized our Fallow field host, and thinking to draw him out, I told our mutual histories.  Next day I went to these Messrs. Grist.  They proposed the membership for Fallow field, five hundred a year, and the loan of a curricle, on condition.  It ’s singular, Harrington; before anybody knew of the condition I didn’t care about it a bit.  It seemed to me childish.  Who would think of minding wearing a tin plate?  But now!—­the sufferings of Orestes—­what are they to mine?  He wasn’t tied to his Furies.  They did hover a little above him; but as for me, I’m scorched; and I mustn’t say where:  my mouth is locked; the social laws which forbid the employment of obsolete words arrest my exclamations of despair.  What do you advise?’

Evan stared a moment at the wretched object, whose dream of meeting a beneficent old gentleman had brought him to be the sport of a cynical farceur.  He had shivers on his own account, seeing something of himself magnified, and he loathed the fellow, only to feel more acutely what a stigma may be.

’It ‘s a case I can’t advise in,’ he said, as gently as he could.  ‘I should be off the grounds in a hurry.’

‘And then I’m where I was before I met the horrid old brute!’ Raikes moaned.

’I told him over a pint of port-and noble stuff is that Aurora port!—­ I told him—­I amused him till he was on the point of bursting—­I told him I was such a gentleman as the world hadn’t seen—­minus money.  So he determined to launch me.  He said I should lead the life of such a gentleman as the world had not yet seen—­on that simple condition, which appeared to me childish, a senile whim; rather an indulgence of his.’

Evan listened to the tribulations of his friend as he would to those of a doll—­the sport of some experimental child.  By this time he knew something of old Tom Cogglesby, and was not astonished that he should have chosen John Raikes to play one of his farces on.  Jack turned off abruptly the moment he saw they were nearing human figures, but soon returned to Evan’s side, as if for protection.