A back view of the General was displayed in his act of digging.

‘I say I could not allow ladies to see it,’ he informed the gentlemen, who were suffered to inspect it freely.

’But you see, I have no means of escape; I am at her mercy from morning to night,’ the General said, with a quivering tongue, ’unless I stay at home inside the house; and that is death to me, or unless I abandon the place, and my lease; and I shall—­I say, I shall find nowhere in England for anything like the money or conveniences such a gent—­a residence you would call fit for a gentleman.  I call it a bi . . . it is, in short, a gem.  But I shall have to go.’

Young Rolles offered to expostulate with his aunt Angela.

The General said, ’Tha . . .  I thank you very much.  I would not have her ladyship suppose I am so susceptible.  I hardly know,’ he confessed pitiably, ’what it is right to say, and what not—­what not.  I-I-I never know when I am not looking a fool.  I hurry from tree to tree to shun the light.  I am seriously affected in my appetite.  I say, I shall have to go.’

Reginald gave him to understand that if he flew, the shafts would follow him, for Lady Camper would never forgive his running away, and was quite equal to publishing a book of the adventures of Wilsonople.

Sunday afternoon, walking in the park with his daughter on his arm, General Ople met Mr. Rolles.  He saw that the young man and Elizabeth were mortally pale, and as the very idea of wretchedness directed his attention to himself, he addressed them conjointly on the subject of his persecution, giving neither of them a chance of speaking until they were constrained to part.

A sketch was the consequence, in which a withered Cupid and a fading Psyche were seen divided by Wilsonople, who keeps them forcibly asunder with policeman’s fists, while courteously and elegantly entreating them to hear him.  ‘Meet,’ he tells them, ’as often as you like, in my company, so long as you listen to me’; and the pathos of his aspect makes hungry demand for a sympathetic audience.

Now, this, and not the series representing the martyrdom of the old couple at Douro Lodge Gates, whose rigid frames bore witness to the close packing of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General Ople, in his madness from the pursuing bite of the gadfly, handed about at Mrs. Pollington’s lawn-party.  Some have said, that he should not have betrayed his daughter; but it is reasonable to suppose he had no idea of his daughter’s being the Psyche.  Or if he had, it was indistinct, owing to the violence of his personal emotion.  Assuming this to have been the very sketch; he handed it to two or three ladies in turn, and was heard to deliver himself at intervals in the following snatches:  ’As you like, my lady, as you like; strike, I say strike; I bear it; I say I bear it. . . .  If her ladyship is unforgiving, I say I am enduring. . . .  I may go, I was saying I may go mad, but while I have my reason I walk upright, I walk upright.’