He started, as though I had awakened him out of a sleep.  And he was no longer the Fox of the clubs, the cynical, the reckless.  He was no longer the best-dressed man in St. James’s Street, or the aggressive youngster of St. Stephen’s.

“Love it!” he cried.  “Ay, Richard, and few guess how well.  You will not laugh when I tell you that my happiest days have been passed here, when I was but a chit, in the long room where Addison used to walk up and down composing his Spectators:  or trotting after my father through these woods and gardens.  A kinder parent does not breathe than he.  Well I remember how he tossed me in his arms under that tree when I had thrashed another lad for speaking ill of him.  He called me his knight.  In all my life he has never broken faith with me.  When they were blasting down a wall where those palings now stand, he promised me I should see it done, and had it rebuilt and blown down again because I had missed the sight.  All he ever exacted of me was that I should treat him as an elder brother.  He had his own notion of the world I was going into, and prepared me accordingly.  He took me from Eton to Spa, where I learned gaming instead of Greek, and gave me so much a night to risk at play.”

I looked at him in astonishment.  To say that I thought these relations strange would have been a waste of words.

“To be sure,” Charles continued, “I was bound to learn, and could acquire no younger.”  He flicked the glossy red backs of his horses with his whip.  “You are thinking it an extraordinary education, I know,” he added rather sadly.  “I hav a-told you this—­God knows why!  Yes, because I like you damnably, and you would have heard worse elsewhere, both of him and of me.  I fear you have listened to the world’s opinion of Lord Holland.”

Indeed, I had heard a deal of that nobleman’s peculations of the public funds.  But in this he was no worse than the bulk of his colleagues.  His desertion of William Pitt I found hard to forgive.

“The best father in the world, Richard!” cried Charles.  “If his former friends could but look into his kind heart, and see him in his home, they would not have turned their backs upon him.  I do not mean such scoundrels as Rigby.  And now my father is in exile half the year in Nice, and the other half at King’s Gate.  The King and Jack Bute used him for a tool, and then cast him out.  You wonder why I am of the King’s party?” said he, with something sinister in his smile; “I will tell you.  When I got my borough I cared not a fig for parties or principles.  I had only the one definite ambition, to revenge Lord Holland.  Nay,” he exclaimed, stopping my protest, “I was not too young to know rottenness as well as another.  The times are rotten in England.  You may have virtue in America, amongst a people which is fresh from a struggle with the earth and its savages.  We have cursed little at home, in faith.  The King, with his barley water and rising at six, and