ached him, and he pleaded guilty, clearly not wishing to take me
with him, nor would he give me Mlle. Jenny's address, which I had. By
virtue of the threat that I would accompany him if he did not satisfy
me, I managed to extract the story of the Dauphin, aghast at the
discovery of its being true. The fatal after-dinner speech he believed
to have been actually spoken, and he touched on that first. 'A trap
was laid for him, Harry Richmond; and a deuced clever trap it was. They
smuggled in special reporters. There wasn't a bit of necessity for the
toast. But the old vixen has shown her hand, so now he must fight. He
can beat her single-handed on settees. He'll find her a tartar at long
bowls: she sticks at nothing. She blazes out, that he scandalizes her
family. She has a dozen indictments against him. You must stop in town
and keep watch. There's fire in my leg to explode a powder-magazine a
mile off!'

'Is it the Margravine of Rippau?' I inquired. I could think of no other
waspish old woman.

'Lady Dane,' said Jorian. 'She set Edbury on to face him with the
Dauphin. You don't fancy it came of the young dog "all of himself," do
you? Why, it was clever! He trots about a briefless little barrister,
a scribbler, devilish clever and impudent, who does his farces for him.
Tenby 's the fellow's name, and it's the only thing I haven't heard him
pun on. Puns are the smallpox of the language;--we're cursed with an
epidemic. By gad, the next time I meet him I 'll roar out for vaccine
matter.'

He described the dinner given by Edbury at a celebrated City tavern
where my father and this so-called Dauphin were brought together.
'Dinner to-night,' he nodded, as he limped away on his blissful visit
of ceremony to sprightly Chassediane (a bouquet had gone in advance):
he left me stupefied. The sense of ridicule enveloped me in suffocating
folds, howling sentences of the squire's Boeotian burlesque by fits.
I felt that I could not but take the world's part against the man who
allowed himself to be made preposterous externally, when I knew him to
be staking his frail chances and my fortune with such rashness. It was
unpardonable for one in his position to incur ridicule. Nothing but
a sense of duty kept me from rushing out of London, and I might have
indulged the impulse advantageously. Delay threw me into the clutches of
Lady Kane herself, on whom I looked with as composed a visage as I could
command, while she leaned out of her carri