playing spy on his wife.  However, such was the fact; she was going off again, and the marquis did play the mean part.  She walked down the parkroad, and, seeing the cloaked figure of a man, she imagined him to be her Lothario, and very naturally, you will own, fell into his arms.  The gentleman in question was an acquaintance of mine; and the less you follow our example the better for you.  It was a damnable period in morals!  He told me that he saw the scene from the gates, where he had his carriage-and-four ready.  The old lord burst out of an ambush on his wife and her supposed paramour; the lady was imprisoned in her rescuer’s arms, and my friend retired on tiptoe, which was, I incline to think, the best thing he could do.  Our morals were abominable.  Lady Edbury would never see Roy-Richmond after that, nor the old lord neither.  He doubled the sum he had intended to leave him, though.  I heard that he married a second young wife.  Roy, I believe, ended by marrying a great heiress, and reforming.  He was an eloquent fellow, and stood like a general in full uniform, cocked hat and feathers; most amusing fellow at table; beat a Frenchman for anecdote.’

I spared Colonel Heddon the revelation of my relationship to his hero, thanking his garrulity for interrupting me.

How I pitied him when I drove past the gates of the main route to Innsbruck!  For I was bound homeward:  I should soon see England, green cloudy England, the white cliffs, the meadows, the heaths!  And I thanked the colonel again in my heart for having done something to reconcile me to the idea of that strange father of mine.

A banner-like stream of morning-coloured smoke rolled North-eastward as I entered London, and I drove to Temple’s chambers.  He was in Court, engaged in a case as junior to his father.  Temple had become that radiant human creature, a working man, then?  I walked slowly to the Court, and saw him there, hardly recognising him in his wig.  All that he had to do was to prompt his father in a case of collision at sea; the barque Priscilla had run foul of a merchant brig, near the mouth of the Thames, and though I did not expect it on hearing the vessel’s name, it proved to be no other than the barque Priscilla of Captain Jasper Welsh.  Soon after I had shaken Temple’s hand, I was going through the same ceremony with the captain himself, not at all changed in appearance, who blessed his heart for seeing me, cried out that a beard and mustachios made a foreign face of a young Englishman, and was full of the ‘providential’ circumstance of his having confided his case to Temple and his father.

‘Ay, ay, Captain Welsh,’ said Temple, ’we have pulled you through, only another time mind you keep an eye on that look-out man of yours.  Some of your men, I suspect, see double with an easy conscience.  A close net makes slippery eels.’

‘Have you anything to say against my men?’ the captain inquired.