Rippenger for expecting to be paid. We came to that point once
or twice, when so sharply wronged did he appear, and vehement
and indignant, that I banished thoughts which marred my luxurious
contentment in hearing him talk and sing, and behave in his old ways and
new habits.

Plain velvet was his dress at dinner. We had a yellow Hock. Temple's
meditative face over it, to discover the margravine, or something, in
its flavour, was a picture. It was an evening of incessant talking;
no telling of events straightforwardly, but all by fits--all here and
there. My father talked of Turkey, so I learnt he had been in that
country; Temple of the routine of our life at Riversley; I of Kiomi,
the gipsy girl; then we two of Captain Jasper Welsh; my father of the
Princess Ottilia. When I alluded to the margravine, he had a word to say
of Mrs. Waddy; so I learnt she had been in continual correspondence with
him, and had cried heavily about me, poor soul. Temple laughed out
a recollection of Captain Bulsted's 'hic, haec, hoc'; I jumped Janet
Ilchester up on the table; my father expatiated on the comfort of a
volume of Shakespeare to an exiled Englishman. We drank to one another,
and heartily to the statue. My father related the history of the
margravine's plot in duck-and-drake skips, and backward to his first
introduction to her at some Austrian Baths among the mountains. She
wanted amusement--he provided it; she never let him quit her sight from
that moment.

'And now,' he said, 'she has lost me!' He drew out of his pocket-book
a number of designs for the statue of Prince Albrecht, to which the
margravine's initials were appended, and shuffled them, and sighed, and
said:'Most complete arrangements! most complete! No body of men were
ever so well drilled as those fellows up at Bella Vista--could not have
been! And at the climax, in steps the darling boy for whom I laboured
and sweated, and down we topple incontinently! Nothing would have shaken
me but the apparition of my son! I was proof against everything but
that! I sat invincible for close upon an hour--call it an hour! Not
a muscle of me moved: I repeat, the heart in my bosom capered like an
independent organ; had it all its own way, leaving me mine, until Mr.
Temple, take my word for it, there is a guiding hand in some families;
believe it, and be serene in adversity. The change of life at a merry
Court to life in a London alley will exercise our faith. But the
essential thing