morsel?"

"Oh, by all means!--not now." Algernon had an unwonted air of
reflection.--"Father know it?"

"Not yet. He will to-night by nine o'clock."

"Then I must see him by seven. Don't say you met me." He nodded, and
pricked his horse.

"Wants money!" said Adrian, putting the combustible he carried once more
in motion.

The women were the crowning joy of his contemplative mind. He had
reserved them for his final discharge. Dear demonstrative creatures!
Dyspepsia would not weaken their poignant outcries, or self-interest
check their fainting fits. On the generic woman one could calculate. Well
might The Pilgrim's Scrip say of her that, "She is always at Nature's
breast"; not intending it as a compliment. Each woman is Eve throughout
the ages; whereas the Pilgrim would have us believe that the Adam in men
has become warier, if not wiser; and weak as he is, has learnt a lesson
from time. Probably the Pilgrim's meaning may be taken to be, that Man
grows, and Woman does not.

At any rate, Adrian hoped for such natural choruses as you hear in the
nursery when a bauble is lost. He was awake to Mrs. Doria's maternal
predestinations, and guessed that Clare stood ready with the best form of
filial obedience. They were only a poor couple to gratify his
Mephistophelian humour, to be sure, but Mrs. Doria was equal to twenty,
and they would proclaim the diverse ways with which maidenhood and
womanhood took disappointment, while the surrounding Forey girls and
other females of the family assembly were expected to develop the finer
shades and tapering edges of an agitation to which no woman could be
cold.

All went well. He managed cleverly to leave the cake unchallenged in a
conspicuous part of the drawing-room, and stepped gaily down to dinner.
Much of the conversation adverted to Richard. Mrs. Doria asked him if he
had seen the youth, or heard of him.

"Seen him? no! Heard of him? yes!" said Adrian. "I have heard of him. I
heard that he was sublimely happy, and had eaten such a breakfast that
dinner was impossible; claret and cold chicken, cake and"--

"Cake at breakfast!" they all interjected.

"That seems to be his fancy just now."

"What an extraordinary taste!"

"You know, he is educated on a System."

One fast young male Forey allied the System and the cake in a miserable
pun. Adrian, a hater of puns, looked at him, and held the table silent,
as if he were going to speak; but he said nothing, and the young