On the ride that day, she began prattling of this and that with the careless glee that became her well, and then sank into a reverie.  Between-whiles her eyes had raised tumults in Evan’s breast by dropping on him in a sort of questioning way, as if she wished him to speak, or wished to fathom something she would rather have unspoken.  Ere they had finished their ride, she tossed off what burden may have been on her mind as lightly as a stray lock from her shoulders.  He thought that the singular look recurred.  It charmed him too much for him to speculate on it.

The Countess’s opportune ally, the gout, which had reduced the Hon. Melville Jocelyn’s right hand to a state of uselessness, served her with her brother equally:  for, having volunteered his services to the invalided diplomatist, it excused his stay at Beckley Court to himself, and was a mask to his intimacy with Rose, besides earning him the thanks of the family.  Harry Jocelyn, released from the wing of the Countess, came straight to him, and in a rough kind of way begged Evan to overlook his rudeness.

‘You took us all in at Fallow field, except Drummond,’ he said.  ’Drummond would have it you were joking.  I see it now.  And you’re a confoundedly clever fellow into the bargain, or you wouldn’t be quill-driving for Uncle Mel.  Don’t be uppish about it—­will you?’

‘You have nothing to fear on that point,’ said Evan.  With which promise the peace was signed between them.  Drummond and William Harvey were cordial, and just laughed over the incident.  Laxley, however, held aloof.  His retention of ideas once formed befitted his rank and station.  Some trifling qualms attended Evan’s labours with the diplomatist; but these were merely occasioned by the iteration of a particular phrase.  Mr. Goren, an enthusiastic tailor, had now and then thrown out to Evan stirring hints of an invention he claimed:  the discovery of a Balance in Breeches:  apparently the philosopher’s stone of the tailor craft, a secret that should ensure harmony of outline to the person and an indubitable accommodation to the most difficult legs.

Since Adam’s expulsion, it seemed, the tailors of this wilderness had been in search of it.  But like the doctors of this wilderness, their science knew no specific:  like the Babylonian workmen smitten with confusion of tongues, they had but one word in common, and that word was ‘cut.’  Mr. Goren contended that to cut was not the key of the science:  but to find a Balance was.  An artistic admirer of the frame of man, Mr. Goren was not wanting in veneration for the individual who had arisen to do it justice.  He spoke of his Balance with supreme self-appreciation.  Nor less so the Honourable Melville, who professed to have discovered the Balance of Power, at home and abroad.  It was a capital Balance, but inferior to Mr. Goren’s.  The latter gentleman guaranteed a Balance with motion:  whereas one step not only upset the Honourable Melville’s, but shattered the limbs of Europe.  Let us admit, that it is easier to fit a man’s legs than to compress expansive empires.