as the general of the hour. Down to Doctors'
Commons she expedited the hero, instructing him how boldly to face the
Law, and fib: for that the Law never could mist a fib and a bold face.
Down the hero went, and proclaimed his presence. And lo! the Law
danced to him its sedatest lovely bear's-dance. Think ye the Lawless
susceptible to him than flesh and blood? With a beautiful confidence it
put the few familiar questions to him, and nodded to his replies: then
stamped the bond, and took the fee. It must be an old vagabond at heart
that can permit the irrevocable to go so cheap, even to a hero. For only
mark him when he is petitioned by heroes and heroines to undo what he
does so easily! That small archway of Doctors' Commons seems the eye of
a needle, through which the lean purse has a way, somehow, of slipping
more readily than the portly; but once through, all are camels alike,
the lean purse an especially big camel. Dispensing tremendous marriage
as it does, the Law can have no conscience.

"I hadn't the slightest difficulty," said the exulting hero.

"Of course not!" returns Mrs. Berry. "It's as easy, if ye're in earnest,
as buying a plum bun."

Likewise the ambassador of the hero went to claim the promise of the
Church to be in attendance on a certain spot, on a certain day, and
there hear oath of eternal fealty, and gird him about with all its
forces: which the Church, receiving a wink from the Law, obsequiously
engaged to do, for less than the price of a plum-cake.

Meantime, while craftsmen and skilled women, directed by Mrs. Berry,
were toiling to deck the day at hand, Raynham and Belthorpe slept,--the
former soundly; and one day was as another to them. Regularly every
morning a letter arrived from Richard to his father, containing
observations on the phenomena of London; remarks (mainly cynical) on
the speeches and acts of Parliament; and reasons for not having yet been
able to call on the Grandisons. They were certainly rather monotonous
and spiritless. The baronet did not complain. That cold dutiful tone
assured him there was no internal trouble or distraction. "The letters
of a healthful physique!" he said to Lady Blandish, with sure insight.
Complacently he sat and smiled, little witting that his son's ordeal
was imminent, and that his son's ordeal was to be his own. Hippias wrote
that his nephew was killing him by making appointments which he never
kept, and altogether neglecting him in the most shamele