Temple, sitting opposite, grinned cheerfully at times to encourage our spirits; he had not recovered from his wonderment, nor had I introduced him.  My father, however, had caught his name.  Temple (who might as well have talked, I thought) was perpetually stealing secret glances of abstracted perusal at him with a pair of round infant’s eyes, sucking his reflections the while.  My father broke our silence.

‘Mr. Temple, I have the honour,’ he said, as if about to cough; ’the honour of making your acquaintance; I fear you must surrender the hope of making mine at present.’

Temple started and reddened like a little fellow detected in straying from his spelling-book, which was the window-frame.  In a minute or so the fascination proved too strong for him; his eyes wandered from the window and he renewed his shy inspection bit by bit as if casting up a column of figures.

‘Yes, Mr. Temple, we are in high Germany,’ said my father.

It must have cost Temple cruel pain, for he was a thoroughly gentlemanly boy, and he could not resist it.  Finally he surprised himself in his stealthy reckoning:  arrived at the full-breech or buttoned waistband, about half-way up his ascent from the red silk stocking, he would pause and blink rapidly, sometimes jump and cough.

To put him at his ease, my father exclaimed, ‘As to this exterior,’ he knocked his knuckles on the heaving hard surface, ’I can only affirm that it was, on horseback—­ahem! particularly as the horse betrayed no restivity, pronounced perfect!  The sole complaint of our interior concerns the resemblance we bear to a lobster.  Human somewhere, I do believe myself to be.  I shall have to be relieved of my shell before I can at all satisfactorily proclaim the fact.  I am a human being, believe me.’

He begged permission to take breath a minute.

’I know you for my son’s friend, Mr. Temple:  here is my son, my boy, Harry Lepel Richmond Roy.  Have patience:  I shall presently stand unshelled.  I have much to relate; you likewise have your narrative in store.  That you should have lit on me at the critical instant is one of those miracles which combine to produce overwhelming testimony—­ay, Richie! without a doubt there is a hand directing our destiny.’  His speaking in such a strain, out of pure kindness to Temple, huskily, with his painful attempt to talk like himself, revived his image as the father of my heart and dreams, and stirred my torpid affection, though it was still torpid enough, as may be imagined, when I state that I remained plunged in contemplation of his stocking of red silk emerging from the full bronzed breech, considering whether his comparison of himself to a shell-fish might not be a really just one.  We neither of us regained our true natures until he was free of every vestige of the garb of Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth.  Attendants were awaiting him at the garden-gate of a beautiful villa partly girdled by rising fir-woods on its footing of bright green meadow.  They led him away, and us to bath-rooms.