I followed my father’s meaning as the shadow of a bird follows it in sunlight; it made no stronger an impression than a flying shadow on the grass; still I could verify subsequently that I had penetrated him—­I had caught the outline of his meaning—­though I was little accustomed to his manner of communicating his ideas:  I had no notion of what he touched on with the words, prestige, essence, and odour.

My efforts to gather the reason for his having left me neglected at school were fruitless.  ’Business, business! sad necessity! hurry, worry-the-hounds!’ was his nearest approach to an explicit answer; and seeing I grieved his kind eyes, I abstained.  Nor did I like to defend Mr. Rippenger for expecting to be paid.  We came to that point once or twice, when so sharply wronged did he appear, and vehement and indignant, that I banished thoughts which marred my luxurious contentment in hearing him talk and sing, and behave in his old ways and new habits.

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