en.

"So it is, unless somebody can invent something better. I hate races,
where a fellow has nothing to do with himself when he can't afford
to bet. I don't mean to take to cards for the next ten years. I have
never been up in a balloon. Spooning is good fun, but it comes to an
end so soon one way or another. Girls are so wide-awake that they
won't spoon for nothing. Upon the whole I don't see what a fellow is
to do unless he kills something."

"You won't have much to kill on board the yacht," said Roden.

"Fishing without end in Iceland and Norway! I knew a man who killed a
ton of trout out of an Iceland lake. He had to pack himself up very
closely in tight-fitting nets, or the midges would have eaten him.
And the skin came off his nose and ears from the sun. But he liked
that rather than not, and he killed his ton of trout."

"Who weighed them?" asked Hampstead.

"How well you may know a Utilitarian by the nature of his questions!
If a man doesn't kill his ton all out, he can say he did, which is
the next best thing to it."

"Are you taking close-packing nets with you?" Roden asked.

"Well, no. Hampstead would be too impatient. And the _Free Trader_
isn't big enough to bring away the fish. But I don't mind betting a
sovereign that I kill something every day I'm out,--barring Sundays."

Not a word was said about Lady Frances, although there were a few
moments in which Roden and Lord Hampstead were alone together. Roden
had made up his mind that he would ask no questions unless the
subject were mentioned, and did not even allude to any of the family;
but he learnt in the course of the evening that the Marquis had
come back from Germany with the intention of attending to his
Parliamentary duties during the remainder of the Session.

"He's going to turn us all out," said Vivian, "on the County
Franchise, I suppose."

"I'm afraid my father is not so keen about County Franchise as he
used to be, though I hope he will be one of the few to support it in
the House of Lords if the House of Commons ever dares to pass it."

In this way Roden learnt that the Marquis, who had carried his
daughter off to Saxony as soon as he had heard of the engagement,
had left his charge there and had returned to London. As he went
home that evening he thought that it would be his duty to go to Lord
Kingsbury, and tell him, as from himself, that which the father had
as yet only learnt from his daughter or from his wife. He was aware