I looked at my father:  I felt stifling with confusion and rage.  He leant over to her, imparting some ecstatic news about a great lady having determined to call on her to regulate the affairs of an approaching grand Ball, and under cover of this we escaped.

‘If it were not,’ said he, ’for the Chassediane—­you are aware, Richie, poor Jorian is lost to her?—­he has fallen at her quicksilver feet.  She is now in London.  Half the poor fellow’s income expended in bouquets!  Her portrait, in the character of the widow Lefourbe, has become a part of his dressing apparatus; he shaves fronting her playbill.  His first real affaire de coeur, and he is forty-five!  So he is taken in the stomach.  That is why love is such a dangerous malady for middle age.  As I said, but for Jenny Chassediane, our Sampleman would be the fortune for Jorian.  I have hinted it on both sides.  Women, Richie, are cleverer than the illustrious Lord Nelson in not seeing what their inclinations decline to see, and Jorian would do me any service in the world except that one.  You are restless, my son?’

I begged permission to quit the house, and wait for him outside.  He, in return, begged me most urgently to allow myself to be introduced to Lady Edbury, the stepmother of Lord Destrier, now Marquis of Edbury; and, using conversational pressure, he adjured me not to slight this lady, adding, with more significance than the words conveyed, ’I am taking the tide, Richie.’  The tide took me, and I bowed to a lady of impressive languor, pale and young, with pleasant manners, showing her character in outline, like a glove on the hand, but little of its quality.  She accused my father of coming direct from ‘that person’s’ box.  He replied that he never forsook old friends.  ‘You should,’ was her rejoinder.  It suggested to me an image of one of the sister Fates cutting a thread.

My heart sank when, from Lady Edbury too, I heard the allusion to Germany and its princess.  ‘Some one told me she was dark?’

‘Blonde,’ my father corrected the report.

Lady Edbury ’thought it singular for a German woman of the Blood to be a brunette.  They had not much dark mixture among them, particularly in the North.  Her name?  She had forgotten the name of the princess.’

My father repeated:  ’The Princess Ottilia, Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.’

‘Brunette, you say?’

‘The purest blonde.’

‘A complexion?’

‘A complexion to dazzle the righteous!’

Lady Edbury threw a flying glance in a mirror:  ’The unrighteous you leave to us then?’

They bandied the weariful shuttlecock of gallantry.  I bowed and fled.  My excuse was that I had seen Anna Penrhys in an upper tier of boxes, and I made my way to her, doubting how I should be welcomed.  ’The happy woman is a German princess, we hear!’ she set me shivering.  Her welcome was perfectly unreserved and friendly.