’Papa, if the prince won’t pay for a real statue, I will, and I’ll present it in your name!’

‘To the nation?’ cried he, staring, and arresting his arm in what seemed an orchestral movement.

‘To the margravine !’

He heard, but had to gather his memory.  He had been fighting the battle, and made light of Bella Vista.  I found that incidents over which a day or two had rolled lost their features to him.  He never smiled at recollections.  If they were forced on him noisily by persons he liked, perhaps his face was gay, but only for a moment.  The gaiety of his nature drew itself from hot-springs of hopefulness:  our arrival in England, our interviews there, my majority Burgundy, my revisitation of Germany—­these events to come gave him the aspect children wear out a-Maying or in an orchard.  He discussed the circumstances connected with the statue as dry matter-of-fact, and unless it was his duty to be hilarious at the dinner-table, he was hardly able to respond to a call on his past life and mine.  His future, too, was present tense:  ’We do this,’ not ‘we will do this’; so that, generally, no sooner did we speak of an anticipated scene than he was acting in it.  I studied him eagerly, I know, and yet quite unconsciously, and I came to no conclusions.  Boys are always putting down the ciphers of their observations of people beloved by them, but do not add up a sum total.

Our journey home occupied nearly eleven weeks, owing to stress of money on two occasions.  In Brussels I beheld him with a little beggar-girl in his arms.

‘She has asked me for a copper coin, Richie,’ he said, squeezing her fat cheeks to make cherries of her lips.

I recommended him to give her a silver one.

’Something, Richie, I must give the little wench, for I have kissed her, and, in my list of equivalents, gold would be the sole form of repayment after that.  You must buy me off with honour, my boy.’

I was compelled to receive a dab from the child’s nose, by way of a kiss, in return for buying him off with honour.

The child stumped away on the pavement fronting our hotel, staring at its fist that held the treasure.

‘Poor pet wee drab of it!’ exclaimed my father.  ’One is glad, Richie, to fill a creature out of one’s emptiness.  Now she toddles; she is digesting it rapidly.  The last performance of one’s purse is rarely so pleasant as that.  I owe it to her that I made the discovery in time.’

In this manner I also made the discovery that my father had no further supply of money, none whatever.  How it had run out without his remarking it, he could not tell; he could only assure me that he had become aware of the fact while searching vainly for a coin to bestow on the beggar-girl.  I despatched a letter attested by a notary of the city, applying for money to the banker to whom Colonel Goodwin had introduced me on my arrival on the Continent.  The money came, and in the meantime we had formed acquaintances and entertained them; they were chiefly half-pay English military officers, dashing men.  One, a Major Dykes, my father established in our hotel, and we carried him on to Paris, where, consequent upon our hospitalities, the purse was again deficient.