venient, but
you will put up with inconvenience. I don't like to keep Papa up
late; and if he is tired he won't speak to you as he would if you
came early.--L. K." Phineas was engaged to dine with Lord Cantrip;
but he wrote to excuse himself,--telling the simple truth. He had
been asked to see Lord Brentford on business, and must obey the
summons.

He was shown into a sitting-room on the ground floor, which he
had always known as the Earl's own room, and there he found Lord
Brentford alone. The last time he had been there he had come to plead
with the Earl on behalf of Lord Chiltern, and the Earl had then been
a stern self-willed man, vigorous from a sense of power, and very
able to maintain and to express his own feelings. Now he was a
broken-down old man,--whose mind had been, as it were, unbooted and
put into moral slippers for the remainder of its term of existence
upon earth. He half shuffled up out of his chair as Phineas came
up to him, and spoke as though every calamity in the world were
oppressing him. "Such a passage! Oh, very bad, indeed! I thought it
would have been the death of me. Laura thought it better to come on."
The fact, however, had been that the Earl had so many objections to
staying at Calais, that his daughter had felt herself obliged to
yield to him.

"You must be glad at any rate to have got home," said Phineas.

"Home! I don't know what you call home. I don't suppose I shall ever
feel any place to be home again."

"You'll go to Saulsby;--will you not?"

"How can I tell? If Chiltern would have kept the house up, of course
I should have gone there. But he never would do anything like anybody
else. Violet wants me to go to that place they've got there, but I
shan't do that."

"It's a comfortable house."

"I hate horses and dogs, and I won't go."

There was nothing more to be said on that point. "I hope Lady Laura
is well."

"No, she's not. How should she be well? She's anything but well.
She'll be in directly, but she thought I ought to see you first. I
suppose this wretched man is really mad."

"I am told so."

"He never was anything else since I knew him. What are we to do now?
Forster says it won't look well to ask for a separation only because
he's insane. He tried to shoot you?"

"And very nearly succeeded."

"Forster says that if we do anything, all that must come out."

"There need not be the slightest hesitation as far as I am concerned,
Lord Brentford."

"You know