‘I do wish he’d throw it up,’ Temple exclaimed.  ’It makes him enemies.  And just examining it, you see he could get no earthly good out of it:  he might as well try to scale a perpendicular rock.  But when I’m with him, I’m ready to fancy what he pleases—­I acknowledge that.  He has excess of phosphorus, or he’s ultra-electrical; doctors could tell us better than lawyers.’  Temple spoke of the clever young barrister Tenby as the man whom his father had heard laughing over the trick played upon ’Roy Richmond.’  I conceived that I might furnish Mr. Tenby a livelier kind of amusement, and the thought that I had once been sur le terrain, and had bitterly regretted it, by no means deterred me from the idea of a second expedition, so black was my mood.  A review of the circumstances, aided by what reached my ears before the night went over, convinced me that Edbury was my man.  His subordinate helped him to the instrument, and possibly to the plot, but Edbury was the capital offender.

The scene of the prank was not in itself so bad as the stuff which a cunning anecdotist could make out of it.  Edbury invited my father to a dinner at a celebrated City tavern.  He kept his guests (Jennings, Jorian DeWitt, Alton, Wedderburn, were among the few I was acquainted with who were present) awaiting the arrival of a person for whom he professed extraordinary respect.  The Dauphin of France was announced.  A mild, flabby, amiable-looking old person, with shelving forehead and grey locks—­excellently built for the object, Jorian said—­entered.  The Capet head and embonpoint were there.  As far as a personal resemblance might go, his pretensions to be the long-lost Dauphin were grotesquely convincing, for, notwithstanding the accurate picture of the Family presented by him, the man was a pattern bourgeois:—­a sturdy impostor, one would have thought, and I thought so when I heard of him; but I have been assured that he had actually grown old in the delusion that he, carrying on his business in the City of London, was the identical Dauphin.

Edbury played his part by leading his poor old victim half way to meet his other most honoured guest, hesitating then and craving counsel whether he was right in etiquette to advance the Dauphin so far.  The Dauphin left him mildly to decide the point:  he was eminently mild throughout, and seems to have thought himself in good faith surrounded by believers and adherents.  Edbury’s task soon grew too delicate for that coarse boy.  In my father’s dexterous hands he at once lost his assumption of the gallantry of manner which could alone help him to retain his advantage.  When the wine was in him he began to bawl.  I could imagine the sort of dialogue he raised.  Bets on the Dauphin, bets on Roy:  they were matched as on a racecourse.  The Dauphin remembered incidents of his residence in the Temple, with a beautiful juvenile faintness:  a conscientious angling for recollection, Wedderburn said.  Roy was requested to remember something, to drink and refresh his memory infantine incidents were suggested.  He fenced the treacherous host during dinner with superb complacency.