Plain velvet was his dress at dinner.  We had a yellow Hock.  Temple’s meditative face over it, to discover the margravine, or something, in its flavour, was a picture.  It was an evening of incessant talking; no telling of events straightforwardly, but all by fits—­all here and there.  My father talked of Turkey, so I learnt he had been in that country; Temple of the routine of our life at Riversley; I of Kiomi, the gipsy girl; then we two of Captain Jasper Welsh; my father of the Princess Ottilia.  When I alluded to the margravine, he had a word to say of Mrs. Waddy; so I learnt she had been in continual correspondence with him, and had cried heavily about me, poor soul.  Temple laughed out a recollection of Captain Bulsted’s ‘hic, haec, hoc’; I jumped Janet Ilchester up on the table; my father expatiated on the comfort of a volume of Shakespeare to an exiled Englishman.  We drank to one another, and heartily to the statue.  My father related the history of the margravine’s plot in duck-and-drake skips, and backward to his first introduction to her at some Austrian Baths among the mountains.  She wanted amusement—­he provided it; she never let him quit her sight from that moment.

‘And now,’ he said, ‘she has lost me!’ He drew out of his pocket-book a number of designs for the statue of Prince Albrecht, to which the margravine’s initials were appended, and shuffled them, and sighed, and said:’Most complete arrangements! most complete!  No body of men were ever so well drilled as those fellows up at Bella Vista—­could not have been!  And at the climax, in steps the darling boy for whom I laboured and sweated, and down we topple incontinently!  Nothing would have shaken me but the apparition of my son!  I was proof against everything but that!  I sat invincible for close upon an hour—­call it an hour!  Not a muscle of me moved:  I repeat, the heart in my bosom capered like an independent organ; had it all its own way, leaving me mine, until Mr. Temple, take my word for it, there is a guiding hand in some families; believe it, and be serene in adversity.  The change of life at a merry Court to life in a London alley will exercise our faith.  But the essential thing is that Richie has been introduced here, and I intend him to play a part here.  The grandson and heir of one of the richest commoners in England—­I am not saying commoner as a term of reproach—­ possessed of a property that turns itself over and doubles itself every ten years, may—­mind you, may—­on such a solid foundation as that!—­and as to birth, your Highness has only to grant us a private interview.’

Temple was dazed by this mystifying address to him; nor could I understand it.

‘Why, papa, you always wished for me to go into Parliament,’ said I.

‘I do,’ he replied, ’and I wish you to lead the London great world.  Such topics are for by-and-by.  Adieu to them!’ He kissed his wafting finger-tips.

We fell upon our random talk again with a merry rattle.