General withdrawing of heads from street-windows, emigration of organs and bands, and a relaxed atmosphere in the circle of Mrs. Berry’s abode, proved that Dan Cupid had veritably flown to suck the life of fresh regions.  With a pensive mind she grasped Ripton’s arm to regulate his steps, and returned to the room where her creditor awaited her.  In the interval he had stormed her undefended fortress, the cake, from which altitude he shook a dolorous head at the guilty woman.  She smoothed her excited apron, sighing.  Let no one imagine that she regretted her complicity.  She was ready to cry torrents, but there must be absolute castigation before this criminal shall conceive the sense of regret; and probably then she will cling to her wickedness the more—­such is the born Pagan’s tenacity!  Mrs. Berry sighed, and gave him back his shake of the head.  O you wanton, improvident creature! said he.  O you very wise old gentleman! said she.  He asked her the thing she had been doing.  She enlightened him with the fatalist’s reply.  He sounded a bogey’s alarm of contingent grave results.  She retreated to the entrenched camp of the fact she had helped to make.

“It’s done!” she exclaimed.  How could she regret what she felt comfort to know was done?  Convinced that events alone could stamp a mark on such stubborn flesh, he determined to wait for them, and crouched silent on the cake, with one finger downwards at Ripton’s incision there, showing a crumbling chasm and gloomy rich recess.

The eloquent indication was understood.  “Dear! dear!” cried Mrs. Berry, “what a heap o’ cake, and no one to send it to!”

Ripton had resumed his seat by the table and his embrace of the claret.  Clear ideas of satisfaction had left him and resolved to a boiling geysir of indistinguishable transports.  He bubbled, and waggled, and nodded amicably to nothing, and successfully, though not without effort, preserved his uppermost member from the seductions of the nymph, Gravitation, who was on the look-out for his whole length shortly.

“Ha! ha!” he shouted, about a minute after Mrs. Berry had spoken, and almost abandoned himself to the nymph on the spot.  Mrs. Berry’s words had just reached his wits.

“Why do you laugh, young man?” she inquired, familiar and motherly on account of his condition.

Ripton laughed louder, and caught his chest on the edge of the table and his nose on a chicken.  “That’s goo’!” he said, recovering, and rocking under Mrs. Berry’s eyes.  “No friend!”

“I did not say, no friend,” she remarked.  “I said, no one; meanin’, I know not where for to send it to.”

Ripton’s response to this was:  You put a Griffin on that cake.  Wheatsheaves each side.”

“His crest?” Mrs. Berry said sweetly.

“Oldest baronetcy ’n England!” waved Ripton.

“Yes?” Mrs. Berry encouraged him on.

“You think he’s Richards.  We’re oblige’ be very close.  And she’s the most lovely!—­If I hear man say thing ’gainst her.”