‘Nikolas!’ Mr. Adister thundered.  ’Hold back that name in this house, title and all, if you speak of my daughter.  I refuse admission to it here.  She has given up my name, and she must be known by the one her feather-brained grandmother proposed for her, to satisfy her pleasure in a fine sound.  English Christian names are my preference.  I conceded Arthur to her without difficulty.  She had a voice in David, I recollect; with very little profit to either of the boys.  I had no voice in Adiante; but I stood at my girl’s baptism, and Adiante let her be.  At least I saved the girl from the addition of Arianrod.  It was to have been Adiante Arianrod.  Can you credit it?  Prince-pah!  Nikolas?  Have you a notion of the sort of prince that makes an English lady of the best blood of England his princess?’

The lawyer had a precise notion of the sort of prince appearing to Mr. Adister in the person of his foreign son-in-law.  Prince Nikolas had been described to him before, with graphic touches upon the quality of the reputation he bore at the courts and in the gambling-saloons of Europe.  Dreading lest his client’s angry heat should precipitate him on the prince again, to the confusion of a lady’s ears, Mr. Camminy gave an emphatic and short affirmative.

‘You know what he is like?’ said Mr. Adister, with a face of disgust reflected from the bare thought of the hideous likeness.

Mr. Camminy assured him that the description of the prince’s lineaments would not be new.  It was, as he was aware, derived from a miniature of her husband, transmitted by the princess, on its flight out of her father’s loathing hand to the hearthstone and under his heel.

Assisted by Caroline, he managed to check the famous delineation of the adventurer prince in which a not very worthy gentleman’s chronic fever of abomination made him really eloquent, quick to unburden himself in the teeth of decorum.

‘And my son-in-law!  My son-in-law!’ ejaculated Mr. Adister, tossing his head higher, and so he stimulated his amazement and abhorrence of the portrait he rather wondered at them for not desiring to have sketched for their execration of it, alluringly foul as it was:  while they in concert drew him back to the discussion of his daughter’s business, reiterating prudent counsel, with a knowledge that they had only to wait for the ebbing of his temper.

’Let her be informed, sir, that by coming to England she can settle the business according to her wishes in one quarter of the time it would take a Commission sent out to her—­if we should be authorised to send out one,’ said Mr. Camminy.  ’By committing the business to you, I fancy I perceive your daughter’s disposition to consider your feelings:  possibly to a reluctance to do the deed unsanctioned by her father.  It would appear so to a cool observer, notwithstanding her inattention to your remonstrances.’

The reply was:  ’Dine here and sleep here.  I shall be having more of these letters,’ Mr. Adister added, profoundly sighing.