I quitted them.  Sir Weeton Slater walked half-a-dozen steps beside me.  ’May I presume on a friendly acquaintance with your father, Mr. Richmond?’ he said.  ’The fact is—­you will not be offended?—­he is apt to lose his head, unless the Committee of Supply limits him very precisely.  I am aware that there is no material necessity for any restriction.’  He nodded to me as to one of the marvellously endowed, as who should say, the Gods presided at your birth.  The worthy baronet struggled to impart his meaning, which was, that he would have me define something like an allowance to my father, not so much for the purpose of curtailing his expenditure—­he did not venture upon private ground—­as to bridle my father’s ideas of things possible for a private gentleman in this country.  In that character none were like him.  As to his suit, or appeal, he could assure me that Serjeant Wedderburn, and all who would or could speak on the subject, saw no prospect of success; not any.  The worst of it was, that it caused my father to commit himself in sundry ways.  It gave a handle to his enemies.  It—­he glanced at me indicatively.

I thanked the well-meaning gentleman without encouraging him to continue.

’It led him to perform once more as a Statue of Bronze before the whole of gaping London!’ I could have added.  That scene on the pine-promontory arose in my vision, followed by other scenes of the happy German days.  I had no power to conjure up the princess.

Jorian DeWitt was the man I wanted to see.  After applications at his Club and lodgings I found him dragging his Burgundy leg in the Park, on his road to pay a morning visit to his fair French enchantress.  I impeached him, and he pleaded guilty, clearly not wishing to take me with him, nor would he give me Mlle. Jenny’s address, which I had.  By virtue of the threat that I would accompany him if he did not satisfy me, I managed to extract the story of the Dauphin, aghast at the discovery of its being true.  The fatal after-dinner speech he believed to have been actually spoken, and he touched on that first.  ’A trap was laid for him, Harry Richmond; and a deuced clever trap it was.  They smuggled in special reporters.  There wasn’t a bit of necessity for the toast.  But the old vixen has shown her hand, so now he must fight.  He can beat her single-handed on settees.  He’ll find her a tartar at long bowls:  she sticks at nothing.  She blazes out, that he scandalizes her family.  She has a dozen indictments against him.  You must stop in town and keep watch.  There’s fire in my leg to explode a powder-magazine a mile off!’

‘Is it the Margravine of Rippau?’ I inquired.  I could think of no other waspish old woman.

‘Lady Dane,’ said Jorian.  ’She set Edbury on to face him with the Dauphin.  You don’t fancy it came of the young dog “all of himself,” do you?  Why, it was clever!  He trots about a briefless little barrister, a scribbler, devilish clever and impudent, who does his farces for him.  Tenby ’s the fellow’s name, and it’s the only thing I haven’t heard him pun on.  Puns are the smallpox of the language;—­we’re cursed with an epidemic.  By gad, the next time I meet him I ’ll roar out for vaccine matter.’