From the Gardens, in contempt of Ripton’s frowned protest, Richard boldly struck into the park, where solitary carriages were beginning to perform the circuit.  Here Ripton had some justification for his jealous pangs.  The young girl’s golden locks of hair; her sweet, now dreamily sad, face; her gentle graceful figure in the black straight dress she wore; a sort of half-conventual air she had—­a mark of something not of class, that was partly beauty’s, partly maiden innocence growing conscious, partly remorse at her weakness and dim fear of the future it was sowing—­did attract the eye-glasses.  Ripton had to learn that eyes are bearable, but eye-glasses an abomination.  They fixed a spell upon his courage; for somehow the youth had always ranked them as emblems of our nobility, and hearing two exquisite eye-glasses, who had been to front and rear several times, drawl in gibberish generally imputed to lords, that his heroine was a charming little creature, just the size, but had no style,—­he was abashed; he did not fly at them and tear them.  He became dejected.  Beauty’s dog is affected by the eye-glass in a manner not unlike the common animal’s terror of the human eye.

Richard appeared to hear nothing, or it was homage that he heard.  He repeated to Lucy Diaper Sandoe’s verses—­

     “The cockneys nod to each other aside,
     The coxcombs lift their glasses,”

and projected hiring a horse for her to ride every day in the park, and shine among the highest.

They had turned to the West, against the sky glittering through the bare trees across the water, and the bright-edged rack.  The lover, his imagination just then occupied in clothing earthly glories in celestial, felt where his senses were sharpest the hand of his darling falter, and instinctively looked ahead.  His uncle Algernon was leisurely jolting towards them on his one sound leg.  The dismembered Guardsman talked to a friend whose arm supported him, and speculated from time to time on the fair ladies driving by.  The two white faces passed him unobserved.  Unfortunately Ripton, coming behind, went plump upon the Captain’s live toe—­or so he pretended, crying, “Confound it, Mr. Thompson! you might have chosen the other.”

The horrible apparition did confound Ripton, who stammered that it was extraordinary.

“Not at all,” said Algernon.  “Everybody makes up to that fellow.  Instinct, I suppose!”

He had not to ask for his nephew.  Richard turned to face the matter.

“Sorry I couldn’t wait for you this morning, uncle,” he said, with the coolness of relationship.  “I thought you never walked so far.”

His voice was in perfect tone—­the heroic mask admirable.

Algernon examined the downcast visage at his side, and contrived to allude to the popular preacher.  He was instantly introduced to Ripton’s sister, Miss Thompson.

The Captain bowed, smiling melancholy approval of his nephew’s choice of a minister.  After a few stray remarks, and an affable salute to Miss Thompson, he hobbled away, and then the three sealed volcanoes breathed, and Lucy’s arm ceased to be squeezed quite so much up to the heroic pitch.