for Mr. Goldsmith had asked him with some solicitude, whether he thought ‘that lad, young More,’ positively unwell; and had gone the length of expressing that he seemed to be fairly sharp, and stuck to his work.  Mr. Kendal seized the moment for telling his opinion, of Ulick, and though Mr. Goldsmith coughed and looked dry and almost contemptuous, he was perceptibly gratified, and replied with a maxim evidently intended both as an excuse for himself and as a warning to the Kendals, that young men were always spoilt by being made too much of—­in his younger days—­&c.

Lucy, meantime, was undergoing the broad banter of her unrefined cousins on the subject of the Irish clerk.  A very little grace in the perpetration would have made it grateful to her vanity, but this was far too broad raillery, and made her hold up her head with protestations of her perfect indifference, to which her cousins manifested incredulity, visiting on her with some petty spite their small jealousies of her higher pretensions, and of the attention which had been paid to her by Mr. Cavendish Dusautoy.

’Not that he will ever look at you again, Lucy, you need not flatter yourself,’ said the amiable Sarah Anne.  ’Harry Wolfe writes that he was flirting with a beautiful young lady who came to see Oxford, and that he is spending quantities of money.’

‘It is nothing to me, I am sure,’ retorted Lucy.  ’Besides, Gilbert says no such thing.’

‘Gilbert! oh, no!’ exclaimed Miss Drury; ’why, he is just as bad himself.  Papa said, from what Mrs. Wolfe told him, he would not take 500 pounds to pay Mr. Gilbert’s bills.’

Albinia had been hearing much the same story from Mrs. Drury, though not so much exaggerated, and administered with more condolence.  She did not absolutely believe, and yet she could not utterly disbelieve, so the result was a letter to Gilbert, with an anxious exhortation to be careful, and not to be deluded into foolish expenditure in imitation of the Polysyllable; and as no special answer was returned, she dismissed the whole from her mind as a Drury allegation.

The horse chanced to be lame, so that Gilbert could not be met at Hadminster on his return from Oxford, but much earlier than the omnibus usually lumbered into Bayford, he astonished Sophy, who was lying on the sofa in the morning-room, by marching in with a free and easy step, and a loose coat of the most novel device.

‘No one else at home?’ he asked.

’Only grandmamma.  We did not think the omnibus would come in so soon, but I suppose you took a fly, as there were three of you.’

’As if we were going to stand six miles of bus with the Wolfe cub!  No, Dusautoy brought his horse down with him, and I took a fly!’ said Gilbert.  ’Well, and what’s the matter with Captain; has the Irishman been riding him?’

Sophy bit her lip to prevent an angry answer, and was glad that Maurice rushed in, fall of uproarious joy.  ’Hollo! boy, how you grow!  What have you got there?’