to a hermitage, remote from condiments.  They both meant well, and did but speak the diverse language of their blood.  Mrs. Waddy withdrew a respited heart to Dipwell; it being, according to her experiences, the third time that my father had relinquished house and furniture to go into eclipse on the Continent after blazing over London.  She strongly recommended the Continent for a place of restoration, citing his likeness to that animal the chameleon, in the readiness with which he forgot himself among them that knew nothing of him.  We quitted Bulsted previous to the return of the family to Riversley.  My grandfather lay at the island hotel a month, and was brought home desperately ill.  Lady Edbury happened to cross the channel with us.  She behaved badly, I thought; foolishly, my father said.  She did as much as obliqueness of vision and sharpness of feature could help her to do to cut him in the presence of her party:  and he would not take nay.  It seemed in very bad taste on his part; he explained to me off-handedly that he insisted upon the exchange of a word or two for the single purpose of protecting her from calumny.  By and by it grew more explicable to me how witless she had been to give gossip a handle in the effort to escape it.  She sent for him in Paris, but he did not pay the visit.

My grandfather and I never saw one another again.  He had news of me from various quarters, and I of him from one; I was leading a life in marked contrast from the homely Riversley circle of days:  and this likewise was set in the count of charges against my father.  Our Continental pilgrimage ended in a course of riotousness that he did not participate in, and was entirely innocent of, but was held accountable for, because he had been judged a sinner.

‘I am ordered to say,’ Janet wrote, scrupulously obeying the order, ’that if you will leave Paris and come home, and not delay in doing it, your grandfather will receive you on the same footing as heretofore.’

As heretofore! in a letter from a young woman supposed to nourish a softness!

I could not leave my father in Paris, alone; I dared not bring him to London.  In wrath at what I remembered, I replied that I was willing to return to Riversley if my father should find a welcome as well.

Janet sent a few dry lines to summon me over in April, a pleasant month on heath-lands when the Southwest sweeps them.  The squire was dead.  I dropped my father at Bulsted.  I could have sworn to the terms of the Will; Mr. Burgin had little to teach me.  Janet was the heiress; three thousand pounds per annum fell to the lot of Harry Lepel Richmond, to be paid out of the estate, and pass in reversion to his children, or to Janet’s should the aforesaid Harry die childless.

I was hard hit, and chagrined, but I was not at all angry, for I knew what the Will meant.  My aunt Dorothy supplied the interlining eagerly to mollify the seeming cruelty.  ’You have only to ask to have it all, Harry.’  The sturdy squire had done his utmost to forward his cherished wishes after death.  My aunt received five-and-twenty thousand pounds, the sum she had thrown away.  ’I promised that no money of mine should go where the other went,’ she said.