ng man's imaginative mental armour, as he
was of his muscular physical.

"The same sort of day!" mused Richard, looking up. "I suppose my
father's right. We make our own fates, and nature has nothing to do with
it."

Adrian yawned.

"Some difference in the trees, though," Richard continued abstractedly.

"Growing bald at the top," said Adrian.

"Will you believe that my aunt Helen compared the conduct of that
wretched slave Clare to Lucy's, who, she had the cruel insolence to say,
entangled me into marriage?" the hero broke out loudly and rapidly. "You
know--I told you, Adrian--how I had to threaten and insist, and how she
pleaded, and implored me to wait."

"Ah! hum!" mumbled Adrian.

"You remember my telling you?" Richard was earnest to hear her
exonerated.

"Pleaded and implored, my dear boy? Oh, no doubt she did. Where's the
lass that doesn't."

"Call my wife by another name, if you please."

"The generic title can't be cancelled because of your having married one
of the body, my son."

"She did all she could to persuade me to wait!" emphasized Richard.

Adrian shook his head with a deplorable smile.

"Come, come, my good Ricky; not all! not all!"

Richard bellowed: "What more could she have done?"

"She could have shaved her head, for instance."

This happy shaft did stick. With a furious exclamation Richard shot
in front, Adrian following him; and asking him (merely to have his
assumption verified), whether he did not think she might have shaved her
head? and, presuming her to have done so, whether, in candour, he did
not think he would have waited--at least till she looked less of a rank
lunatic?

After a minute or so, the wise youth was but a fly buzzing about
Richard's head. Three weeks of separation from Lucy, and an excitement
deceased, caused him to have soft yearnings for the dear lovely
home-face. He told Adrian it was his intention to go down that night.
Adrian immediately became serious. He was at a loss what to invent
to detain him, beyond the stale fiction that his father was coming
to-morrow. He rendered homage to the genius of woman in these straits.
"My aunt," he thought, "would have the lie ready; and not only that, but
she would take care it did its work."

At this juncture the voice of a cavalier in the Row hailed them, proving
to be the Honourable Peter Brayder, Lord Mountfalcon's parasite. He
greeted them very cordially; and Richard, remembering some fun they had
in the