nor morbidly unwilling to try his luck alone for a term of two weeks.  At present, I am aware, an audience impatient for blood and glory scorns the stress I am putting on incidents so minute, a picture so little imposing.  An audience will come to whom it will be given to see the elementary machinery at work:  who, as it were, from some slight hint of the straws, will feel the winds of March when they do not blow.  To them will nothing be trivial, seeing that they will have in their eyes the invisible conflict going on around us, whose features a nod, a smile, a laugh of ours perpetually changes.  And they will perceive, moreover, that in real life all hangs together:  the train is laid in the lifting of an eyebrow, that bursts upon the field of thousands.  They will see the links of things as they pass, and wonder not, as foolish people now do, that this great matter came out of that small one.

Such an audience, then, will participate in the baronet’s gratification at his son’s demeanour, wherein he noted the calm bearing of experience not gained in the usual wanton way:  and will not be without some excited apprehension at his twinge of astonishment, when, just as the train went sliding into swiftness, he beheld the grave, cold, self-possessed young man throw himself back in the carriage violently laughing.  Science was at a loss to account for that.  Sir Austin checked his mind from inquiring, that he might keep suspicion at a distance, but he thought it odd, and the jarring sensation that ran along his nerves at the sight, remained with him as he rode home.

Lady Blandish’s tender womanly intuition bade her say:  “You see it was the very thing he wanted.  He has got his natural spirits already.”

“It was,” Adrian put in his word, “the exact thing he wanted.  His spirits have returned miraculously.”

“Something amused him,” said the baronet, with an eye on the puffing train.

“Probably something his uncle said or did,” Lady Blandish suggested, and led off at a gallop.

Her conjecture chanced to be quite correct.  The cause for Richard’s laughter was simple enough.  Hippias, on finding the carriage-door closed on him, became all at once aware of the bright-haired hope which dwells in Change; for one who does not woo her too frequently; and to express his sudden relief from mental despondency at the amorous prospect, the Dyspepsy bent and gave his hands a sharp rub between his legs:  which unlucky action brought Adrian’s pastoral,

          “Hippy verteth,
          Sing cuckoo!”

in such comic colours before Richard, that a demon of laughter seized him.

          “Hippy verteth!”

Every time he glanced at his uncle the song sprang up, and he laughed so immoderately that it looked like madness come upon him.

“Why, why, why, what are you laughing at, my dear boy,” said Hippias, and was provoked by the contagious exercise to a modest “ha! ha!”