Lord Fleetwood took Woodseer’s arm.  ‘Do you eat with us?’ he asked the baronet, who had stayed his eating for an hour and was famished; so they strode to the dining-room.

‘Do you wash, sir, before eating?’ Sir Meeson said to Woodseer, caressing his hands when they had seated themselves at table.  ’Appliances are to be found in this hotel.’

‘Soap?’ said Lord Fleetwood.

‘Soap—­at least, in my chamber.’

‘Fetch it, please.’

Sir Meeson, of course, could not hear that.  He requested the waiter to show the gentleman to a room.

Lord Fleetwood ordered the waiter to bring a handbasin and towel.  ’We’re off directly and must eat at once,’ he said.

‘Soap—­soap! my dear Fleetwood,’ Sir Meeson knuckled on the table, to impress it that his appetite and his gorge demanded a thorough cleansing of those fingers, if they were to sit at one board.

‘Let the waiter fetch it.’

‘The soap is in my portmanteau.’

‘You spoke of it as a necessity for this gentleman and me.  Bring it.’

Woodseer had risen.  Lord Fleetwood motioned him down.  He kept an eye dead—­as marble on Corby, who muttered:  ’You can’t mean that you ask me . . .?’ But the alternative was forced on Sir Meeson by too strong a power of the implacable eye; there was thunder in it, a continuity of gaze forcefuller than repetitions of the word.  He knew Lord Fleetwood.  Men privileged to attend on him were dogs to the flinty young despot:  they were sure to be called upon to expiate the faintest offence to him.  He had hastily to consider, that he was banished beyond appeal, with the whole torture of banishment to an adorer of the Countess Livia, or else the mad behest must be obeyed.  He protested, shrugged, sat fast, and sprang up, remarking, that he went with all the willingness imaginable.  It could not have been the first occasion.

He was affecting the excessively obsequious when he came back bearing his metal soap-case.  The performance was checked by another look solid as shot, and as quick.  Woodseer, who would have done for Sir Meeson Corby or Lazarus what had been done for him, thought little of the service, but so intense a peremptoriness in the look of an eye made him uncomfortable in his own sense of independence.  The humblest citizen of a free nation has that warning at some notable exhibition of tyranny in a neighbouring State:  it acts like a concussion of the air.

Lord Fleetwood led an easy dialogue with him and Sir Meeson, on their different themes immediately, which was not less impressive to an observer.  He listened to Sir Meeson’s entreaties that he should start at once for Baden, and appeared to pity the poor gentleman, condemned by his office to hang about him in terror of his liege lady’s displeasure.  Presently, near the close of the meal, drawing a ring from his finger, he handed it to the baronet, and said, ’Give her that.  She knows I shall follow that.’  He added to himself:—­I shall have ill-luck till I have it back! and he asked Woodseer whether he put faith in the virtue of talismans.