Captain Bulsted reached me his hand.  ’You have a great deal to bear, Harry.  I commend you, my boy, for taking it manfully.’

‘I say no more,’ quoth the squire.  ’But what I said was true.  The fellow gives his little dinners and suppers to his marchionesses, countesses, duchesses, and plays clown and pantaloon among the men.  He thinks a parcel o’ broidered petticoats ’ll float him.  So they may till a tradesman sent stark mad pops a pin into him.  Harry, I’d as lief hang on to a fire-ship.  Here’s Ilchester tells me . . . and Ilchester speaks of him under his breath now as if he were sitting in a pew funking the parson.  Confound the fellow!  I say he’s guilty of treason.  Pooh! who cares!  He cuts out the dandies of his day, does he?  He’s past sixty, if he’s a month.  It’s all damned harlequinade.  Let him twirl off one columbine or another, or a dozen, and then—­the last of him!  Fellow makes the world look like a farce.  He ’s got about eight feet by five to caper on, and all London gaping at him—­geese!  Are you a gentleman and a man of sense, Harry Richmond, to let yourself be lugged about in public—­by the Lord! like a pair of street-tumblers in spangled haunch-bags, father and boy, on a patch of carpet, and a drum banging, and tossed and turned inside out, and my God! the ass of a fellow strutting the ring with you on his shoulder!  That’s the spectacle.  And you, Harry, now I ’ll ask you, do you mean your wife—­egad, it’d be a pretty scene, with your princess in hip-up petticoats, stiff as bottle-funnel top down’ards, airing a whole leg, and knuckling a tambourine!’

‘Not crying, my dear lad?’ Captain Bulsted put his arm round me kindly, and tried to catch a glimpse of my face.  I let him see I was not going through that process.  ‘Whew!’ said he, ’and enough to make any Christian sweat!  You’re in a bath, Harry.  I wouldn’t expect the man who murdered his godmother for one shilling and fivepence three-farthings the other day, to take such a slinging, and think he deserved it.’

My power of endurance had reached its limit.

’You tell me, sir, you had this brutal story from the Lord-Lieutenant of the county?’

’Ay, from Lord Shale.  But I won’t have you going to him and betraying our connection with a—­’

‘Halloo!’ Captain Bulsted sang out to his wife on the lawn.  ’And now, squire, I have had my dose.  And you will permit me to observe, that I find it emphatically what we used to call at school black-jack.’

‘And you were all the better for it afterwards, William.’

’We did not arrive at that opinion, sir.  Harry, your arm.  An hour with the ladies will do us both good.  The squire,’ he murmured, wiping his forehead as he went out, ’has a knack of bringing us into close proximity with hell-fire when he pleases.’

Julia screamed on beholding us, ‘Aren’t you two men as pale as death!’

Janet came and looked.  ‘Merely a dose,’ said the captain.  ’We are anxious to play battledore and shuttlecock madly.’