It was a soft fair day.  The Rubicon sparkled in the morning sun.  One of those days when London embraces the prospect of summer, and troops forth all its babies.  The pavement, the squares, the parks, were early alive with the cries of young Britain.  Violet and primrose girls, and organ boys with military monkeys, and systematic bands very determined in tone if not in tune, filled the atmosphere, and crowned the blazing procession of omnibuses, freighted with business men, Cityward, where a column of reddish brown smoke,—­blown aloft by the South-west, marked the scene of conflict to which these persistent warriors repaired.  Richard had seen much of early London that morning.  His plans were laid.  He had taken care to ensure his personal liberty against accidents, by leaving his hotel and his injured uncle Hippias at sunrise.  To-day or to-morrow his father was to arrive.  Farmer Blaize, Tom Bakewell reported to him, was raging in town.  Another day and she might be torn from him:  but to-day this miracle of creation would be his, and then from those glittering banks yonder, let them summon him to surrender her who dared!  The position of things looked so propitious that he naturally thought the powers waiting on love conspired in his behalf.  And she, too—­since she must cross this river, she had sworn to him to be brave, and do him honour, and wear the true gladness of her heart in her face.  Without a suspicion of folly in his acts, or fear of results, Richard strolled into Kensington Gardens, breakfasting on the foreshadow of his great joy, now with a vision of his bride, now of the new life opening to him.  Mountain masses of clouds, rounded in sunlight, swung up the blue.  The flowering chestnut pavilions overhead rustled and hummed.  A sound in his ears as of a banner unfolding in the joyful distance lulled him.

He was to meet his bride at the church at a quarter past eleven.  His watch said a quarter to ten.  He strolled on beneath the long-stemmed trees toward the well dedicated to a saint obscure.  Some people were drinking at the well.  A florid lady stood by a younger one, who had a little silver mug half-way to her mouth, and evinced undisguised dislike to the liquor of the salutary saint.

“Drink, child!” said the maturer lady.  “That is only your second mug.  I insist upon your drinking three full ones every morning we’re in town.  Your constitution positively requires iron!”

“But, mama,” the other expostulated, “it’s so nasty.  I shall be sick.”

“Drink!” was the harsh injunction.  “Nothing to the German waters, my dear.  Here, let me taste.”  She took the mug and gave it a flying kiss.  “I declare I think it almost nice—­not at all objectionable.  Pray, taste it,” she said to a gentleman standing below them to act as cup-bearer.

An unmistakable cis-Rubicon voice replied:  “Certainly, if it’s good fellowship; though I confess I don’t think mutual sickness a very engaging ceremony.”