’Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early morning as you well can.’

Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent, the giant spoke in good fellowship.  It would have been to have strained his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.

He stopped, and laughed:  ’Now I ’m pumping my pulpit-eh?  You come with us to Lakelands.  I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.:  if it’s fine; train half-past.  We take a basket.  By the way, I had no letter from Dartrey last mail.’

‘He has buried his wife.  It happens to some men.’

Mr. Radnor stood gazing.  He asked for the name of the place of the burial.  He heard without seizing it.  A simulacrum spectre-spark of hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening at the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy.  Dartrey—­Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and dishonoured him:  and it was in Africa!  One would have to go to Africa to be free of the galling.  But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!—­The strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring, always in ambush.  We do not speak of them:  we have not words to stamp the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had the words; we know them as out of reason:  they haunt us, pluck at us, fret us, nevertheless.

Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the mind of shackled men.

It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that Dartrey should be free, suddenly free; and free while still a youngish man.  He was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country for vigour, gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness; his heavenly good fortune decked him as a prodigy.

‘No harm to the head from that fall of yours?’ Mr. Fenellan said.

‘None.’  Mr. Radnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and cried cheerily:  ‘Now to business’; as men may, who have confidence in their ability to concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial.  ’You dine with us.  The usual Quartet:  Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or Catkin:  Priscilla Graves and Nataly—­the Rev. Septimus; Cormyn and his wife:  Young Dudley Sowerby and I—­flutes:  he has precision, as naughty Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression.  In the course of the evening, Lady Grace, perhaps:  you like her.’

‘Human nature in the upper circle is particularly likeable.’

‘Fenellan,’ said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey’s, ’I put it to you:  would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend Carling’s report?’