“You will join us?” he asked, profering a slice.  “You will drink, then, at least?  Ah, that is better.  And will you convey my apologies to your two bandits and beg them to excuse my conversing with you in English?  To tell the truth”—­here, having helped them to a slice apiece and laid one aside for the Princess, he took the remainder upon his own plate—­“though as a rule we make collation at noon or a little before, my English stomach cries out against an empty morning.  You will like my Thespians, sir, when you see ’em.  The younger ladies are decidedly—­er—­vivacious.  Bianca, our Columbine, has all the makings of a beauty—­she has but just turned the corner of seventeen; and Lauretta, who plays the scheming chambermaid, is more than passably good-looking.  As for Donna Julia, her charms at this time of day are moral rather than physical:  but, having married our leading lover, Rinaldo, she continues to exact his vows on the stage and the current rate of pay for them from the treasury.  Does Rinaldo’s passion show signs of flagging?  She pulls his ears for it, later on, in conjugal seclusion.  Poor fellow!—­

     “Non equidem invideo; miror magis.

“Do the night’s takings fall short of her equally high standard?  She threatens to pull mine:  for I, cavalier, am the treasurer. . . .  But at what rate am I overrunning my impulses to ask news from you!  How does your father, sir—­that modern Bayard?  And Captain Pomery?  And my old friend Billy Priske?”

I told him, briefly as I could, of my father’s end.  He laid down his spoon and looked at me for a while across the table with eyes which, being unused to emotion, betrayed it awkwardly, with a certain shame.

“A great, a lofty gentleman! . . .  You’ll excuse me, cavalier, but I am not always nor altogether an ass—­and I say to you that half a dozen such knights would rejuvenate Christendom.  As it is, we live in the last worst ages when the breed can afford but one phoenix at a time, and he must perforce spend himself on forlorn hopes.  Mark you, I say ‘spend,’ not ‘waste’:  the seed of such examples cannot be wasted—­”

      ’Only the actions of the just
       Smell sweet and blossom in the dust:’ 

nay, not their actions only, but their every high thought which either fate froze or fortune and circumstance choked before it could put forth flower.  Did I ever tell you, Cavalier, the Story of My Father and the Jobbing Gardener?”

“Not that I remember,” said I.

“Yet it is full of instruction as an egg is full of meat.  My father, who (let me remind you) is a wholesale dealer in flash jewellery, had ever a passion for gardening, albeit that for long he had neither the time nor the money nor even the space to indulge his hobby.  His garden—­a parallelogram of seventy-two feet by twenty-three, confined by brick walls—­lay at the back of our domicile, which excluded all but the late afternoon sunshine.  As the Mantuan would observe—­”