‘A stout one,’ Woodseer replied, with his happy indifference to his exterior.

His dark lady’s eyes were kindly overlooking, like the heavens.  Her fair cousin, to whom he bowed, awakened him to a perception of the spectacle causing the slight, quick arrest of her look, in an astonishment not unlike the hiccup in speech, while her act of courtesy proceeded.  At once he was conscious of the price he paid for respectability, and saw the Teuton skin on the slim Cambrian, baggy at shoulders, baggy at seat, pinched at the knees, short at the heels, showing outrageously every spot where he ought to have been bigger or smaller.  How accept or how reject the invitation to drive in such company to Baden!

‘You’re decided enough, sir, in your play, they tell me,’ the vindictive little baronet commented on his hesitation, and Woodseer sprang to the proffered vacant place.  But he had to speak of his fly waiting for him at the steps of a certain hotel.

‘Best hotel in the town!’ Sir Beeson exclaimed pointedly to Henrietta, reading her constraint with this comical object before her.  It was the admiral’s hotel they stopped at.

’Be so good as to step down and tell the admiral he is to bring Madame Clemence in his carriage to-morrow; and on your way, you will dismiss Mr. Woodseer’s fly,’ Livia mildly addressed her squire.  He stared:  again he had to go, muttering:  ‘That nondescript’s footman!’ and his mischance in being checked and crossed and humiliated perpetually by a dirty-fisted vagabond impostor astounded him.  He sent the flyman to the carriage for orders.

Admiral Fakenham and Carinthia descended.  Sir Meeson heard her cry out:  ‘Is it you!’ and up stood the pretentious lout in the German sack, affecting the graces of a born gentleman fresh from Paris,—­bowing, smirking, excusing himself for something; and he jumped down to the young lady, he talked intimately with her, with a joker’s air; he roused the admiral to an exchange of jokes, and the countess and Miss Fakenham more than smiled; evidently at his remarks, unobservant of the preposterous figure he cut.  Sir Meeson Corby had intimations of the disintegration of his country if a patent tramp burlesquing in those clothes could be permitted to amuse English ladies of high station, quite at home with them.  Among the signs of England’s downfall, this was decidedly one.  What to think of the admiral’s favourite when, having his arm paternally on her shoulder, she gave the tramp her hand at parting, and then blushed!  All that the ladies had to say about it was, that a spread of colour rather went to change the character of her face.