to melt and shape itself anew; but it is never the quality of vapour to reassume the same shapes.  Briareus of the hundred unoccupied hands may turn to a monstrous donkey with his hind legs aloft, or twenty thousand jabbering apes.  The phantasmic groupings of the young brain are very like those we see in the skies, and equally the sport of the wind.  Lady Judith blew.  There was plenty of vapour in him, and it always resolved into some shape or other.  You that mark those clouds of eventide, and know youth, will see the similitude:  it will not be strange, it will barely seem foolish to you, that a young man of Richard’s age, Richard’s education and position, should be in this wild state.  Had he not been nursed to believe he was born for great things?  Did she not say she was sure of it?  And to feel base, yet born for better, is enough to make one grasp at anything cloudy.  Suppose the hero with a game leg.  How intense is his faith to quacks! with what a passion of longing is he not seized to break somebody’s head!  They spoke of Italy in low voices.  “The time will come,” said she.  “And I shall be ready,” said he.  What rank was he to take in the liberating army?  Captain, colonel, general in chief, or simple private?  Here, as became him, he was much more positive and specific than she was:  Simple private, he said.  Yet he save himself caracoling on horseback.  Private in the cavalry, then, of course.  Private in the cavalry over-riding wrecks of Empires.  She looked forth under her brows with mournful indistinctness at that object in the distance.  They read Petrarch to get up the necessary fires.  Italia mia!  Vain indeed was this speaking to those thick and mortal wounds in her fair body, but their sighs went with the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po, and their hands joined.  Who has not wept for Italy?  I see the aspirations of a world arise for her, thick and frequent as the puffs of smoke from cigars of Pannonian sentries!

So when Austin came Richard said he could not leave Lady Judith, Lady Judith said she could not part with him.  For his sake, mind!  This Richard verified.  Perhaps he had reason to be grateful.  The high road of Folly may have led him from one that terminates worse.  Ho is foolish, God knows; but for my part I will not laugh at the hero because he has not got his occasion.  Meet him when he is, as it were, anointed by his occasion, and he is no laughing matter.

Richard felt his safety in this which, to please the world, we must term folly.  Exhalation of vapours was a wholesome process to him, and somebody who gave them shape and hue a beneficent Iris.  He told Austin plainly he could not leave her, and did not anticipate the day when he could.

“Why can’t you go to your wife, Richard?”

“For a reason you would be the first to approve, Austin.”