if your dad may tell you so, wrong.  I ask pardon for my bluntness; but I put it to you, could we, not travelling as personages in our well-beloved country, count on civility to greet us everywhere?  Assuredly not.  My position is, that by consenting to their honest enthusiasm, we the identical effect you are perpetually crying out for—­we civilize them, we civilize them.  Goodness!—­a Great Britain without Royalty!’

He launched on a series of desolate images.  In the end, he at least persuaded himself that he had an idea in his anxiety to cultivate the primary British sentiment.

We moved from town to town along the South coast; but it was vain to hope we might be taken for simple people.  Nor was he altogether to blame, except in allowing the national instinct for ‘worship and reverence’ to air itself unrebuked.  I fled to the island.  Temple ran down to meet me there, and I heard that Janet had written to him for news of me.  He entered our hotel a private person; when he passed out, hats flew off before him.  The modest little fellow went along a double line of attentive observers on the pier, and came back, asking me in astonishment who he was supposed to be.

‘I petitioned for privacy here!’ exclaimed my father.  It accounted for the mystery.

Temple knew my feelings, and did but glance at me.

Close upon Temple’s arrival we had a strange couple of visitors.  ‘Mistress Dolly Disher and her husband,’ my father introduced them.  She called him by one of his Christian names inadvertently at times.  The husband was a confectioner, a satisfied shade of a man who reserved the exercise of his will for his business, we learnt; she, a bustling, fresh-faced woman of forty-five, with still expressive dark eyes, and, I guessed, the ideal remainder of a passion in her bosom.  The guess was no great hazard.  She was soon sitting beside me, telling me of the ‘years’ she had known my father, and of the most affectionate friend and perfect gentleman he was of the ladies who had been in love with him; ’no wonder’:  and of his sorrows and struggles, and his beautiful voice, and hearts that bled for him; and of one at least who prayed and trusted he would be successful at last.

Temple and the pallid confectioner spent the day on board a yacht with my father.  Mrs. Dolly stayed to nurse me and persuade me to swallow medicine.  She talked of her youth, when, as a fashionable bootmaker’s daughter, she permitted no bills to be sent in to Mr. Richmond, alleging, as a sufficient reason for it to her father, that their family came from Richmond in Yorkshire.  Eventually, the bills were always paid.  She had not been able to manage her husband so well; and the consequence was, that (she breathed low) an execution was out; ‘though I tell him,’ she said tremulously, ’he ’s sure to be paid in the long run, if only he’ll wait.  But no; he is you cannot think how obstinate in his business.  And my girl Augusta waiting for Mr.