quarter.  Old Lord Edbury put him down in his will for some thousands, and he risked it to save a lady, who hated him for his pains.  Lady Edbury was of the Bolton blood, none of the tamest; they breed good cavalry men.  She ran away from her husband once.  The old lord took her back.  “It ’s at your peril, mind!” says she.  Well, Roy hears by-and-by of afresh affair.  He mounted horse; he was in the saddle, I’ve been assured, a night and a day, and posted himself between my lady’s park-gates, and the house, at dusk.  The rumour ran that he knew of the marquis playing spy on his wife.  However, such was the fact; she was going off again, and the marquis did play the mean part.  She walked down the parkroad, and, seeing the cloaked figure of a man, she imagined him to be her Lothario, and very naturally, you will own, fell into his arms.  The gentleman in question was an acquaintance of mine; and the less you follow our example the better for you.  It was a damnable period in morals!  He told me that he saw the scene from the gates, where he had his carriage-and-four ready.  The old lord burst out of an ambush on his wife and her supposed paramour; the lady was imprisoned in her rescuer’s arms, and my friend retired on tiptoe, which was, I incline to think, the best thing he could do.  Our morals were abominable.  Lady Edbury would never see Roy-Richmond after that, nor the old lord neither.  He doubled the sum he had intended to leave him, though.  I heard that he married a second young wife.  Roy, I believe, ended by marrying a great heiress, and reforming.  He was an eloquent fellow, and stood like a general in full uniform, cocked hat and feathers; most amusing fellow at table; beat a Frenchman for anecdote.’

I spared Colonel Heddon the revelation of my relationship to his hero, thanking his garrulity for interrupting me.

How I pitied him when I drove past the gates of the main route to Innsbruck!  For I was bound homeward:  I should soon see England, green cloudy England, the white cliffs, the meadows, the heaths!  And I thanked the colonel again in my heart for having done something to reconcile me to the idea of that strange father of mine.

A banner-like stream of morning-coloured smoke rolled North-eastward as I entered London, and I drove to Temple’s chambers.  He was in Court, engaged in a case as junior to his father.  Temple had become that radiant human creature, a working man, then?  I walked slowly to the Court, and saw him there, hardly recognising him in his wig.  All that he had to do was to prompt his father in a case of collision at sea; the barque Priscilla had run foul of a merchant brig, near the mouth of the Thames, and though I did not expect it on hearing the vessel’s name, it proved to be no other than the barque Priscilla of Captain Jasper Welsh.  Soon after I had shaken Temple’s hand, I was going through the same ceremony with the captain himself, not at all changed in appearance, who blessed his heart for seeing me, cried out that a beard and mustachios made a foreign face of a young Englishman, and was full of the ‘providential’ circumstance of his having confided his case to Temple and his father.