No one, after as much as one glance at the Captain’s good-humored but determined countenance, could doubt this. The Earl said fretfully: “Yes, but you don’t understand! It’s all very well for you—However, that don’t signify! The thing is, you know what Lucius is, and that stupid brother-in-law of mine! And here’s my Uncle Yatton taken himself off, and left young Geoffrey to do as he pleases! I wish you will stay, and help me to see that they keep the line!”

So Captain Staple, no gamester, stayed; and if he failed to keep the stakes as low as his noble cousin would have wished he did contrive to prevent the quiet game of loo from becoming an extremely noisy game of loo. By the time Lord Melksham had wearied of this sport, and inaugurated a game of brag, young Mr. Yatton had succumbed to his potations, which, as the Captain cheerfully informed the Earl, was a very happy circumstance, since it cut his losses short.

Having carried Geoffrey up to bed, he presently held his own brother-in-law’s head under the pump in the scullery, guided his cousin Arthur’s wavering steps up the stairs, and gently but firmly convinced Lord Melksham that it would be better to retire to bed than to try the power of a hunting-horn discovered in the Great Hall.

After so strenuous a night it was not surprising that the Captain should have slept far into the morning. He did not leave Easterby until past noon, and had he attended to the representations made to him by his host and his sister he would not have left it at all that day. It was pointed out to him that the sky threatened bad weather, that he could not hope to achieve more than a few miles of his journey, and that he would do well to abandon the whole project of riding to Leicestershire. But the probability of rain did not much trouble any man who was accustomed to bivouacking under the worst of conditions in the Peninsula and the Pyrenees; and the possibility of having to rack up for the night at some wayside inn seemed to him infinitely preferable to another of Lord Melksham’s convivial evenings. So at noon, Cocking, the private servant who had been with him through all his campaigns, brought his big, Roman-nosed bay horse up to the house, and strapped to the saddle a heavy frieze cloak, and the bag which contained all that the Captain considered to be necessary for his journey. The rest of the Captain’s luggage consisted of a couple of portmanteaux, and these he instructed Cocking to despatch by carrier to Edenhope, Mr. Babbacombe’s hunting-box in Leicestershire. The sight of two such modest pieces caused Lord Melksham’s man, a very superior person, to wonder that any gentleman should care to travel about the country so meagrely provided for. His own master, he said, never stirred from home without several trunks, a dressing-case, and himself: a highly talented valet. However, the bubble of his conceit was swiftly pricked, Cocking replying without hesitation that there was nothing for him to hold his nose up at in that. “If the Captain was a tallow-faced twiddle-poop, mounted on a pair o’ cat-sticks, I dessay he’d need a snirp like you to pad his calves out, and finify him,” he said. “Only he ain’t! Would there be anything more you was wishful to say about the Captain?”

Lord Melksham’s man prudently decided that there was nothing more he wished to say, explaining this forbearance later to his colleagues as being due to his reluctance to bandy words with a vulgar make-bait. Cocking, left in possession of the field, carefully loaded the Captain’s pistols, placed them in the saddle-holsters, and led the bay up to the house. The Captain, attired in buckskin breeches and topboots, and a coat of slightly military cut, gave him a few last instructions, and mounted the big horse. Keeping a hand on the bridle, Cocking looked up at him, and asked if he was to join him at Edenhope, when he had escorted the mistress safely home.

“No, you might not find me there. Besides, I shan’t need you.”

“Well, sir, that’s as maybe, but what I should like to know is who’s going to clean them leathers?” demanded his henchman.

“I don’t know. Mr. Babbacombe’s man, I daresay.”

“Ho!” said Cocking. “That’ll put Mr. Babbacombe’s man in prime twig, that will! Howsoever, it’s just as you wish, sir, out of course!”

He then watched his master ride off down the avenue, slowly shaking his head. A sparrow, hopping about within a few yards of him, was the recipient of his next cryptic confidence. “Resty, very resty!” he said, staring very hard at the bird. “If you was to ask me, I should say we shall have him up to some kind of bobbery in just a brace o’ snaps!”

The Captain, although he had not the smallest intention of getting up to bobbery, was heartily glad to escape from Easterby. There was nothing but Lord Melksham’s mild excesses to break the tedium; and he did not find these amusing. His cousin’s life was hedged about by all the proprieties which had driven the Captain, eight years earlier, to persuade his father to buy him a pair of colours. He had had a strong notion that the Army in time of war would suit him, and events had proved him to be right. Life in the Peninsula had been uncertain, uncomfortable, and often haphazard, but it had offered almost every kind of adventure, and John had refused none of these. He had enjoyed himself enormously, and never so intensely as when engaged upon some dangerous enterprise.

But when the war ended, in 1814, although he rejoiced as much as any man in the downfall of Bonaparte, he knew that the life he liked had ended too. Not for John Staple, the boredom of military life in peace-time! He yielded at last to his mother’s solicitations, and sold out. She thought that he would find plenty to occupy him in the management of his estate, his father having died a year previously. The elder John Staple had been an indolent man, and for some months his son was busy enough. Then had come the news of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba, and a brief period of exciting activity for John. But Bonaparte had been a prisoner on St. Helena for two years now, and everyone seemed to feel that it was time John settled down to a life of civilian respectability. He felt it himself, and tried to be content, but every now and then a fit of restlessness would seize him. When that happened his subsequent actions would be unpredictable, though, as his brother-in-law gloomily said, it was safe to assume that they would be freakish, and possibly outrageous. Lord Lichfield had every reason to believe that he had once wandered for a couple of weeks with a party of gypsies; and not readily would he forget John’s sudden arrival at his house in Lincolnshire, at midnight, by way of an open window, and clad in strange and disreputable garments.

“Good God, what have you been doing?” he had exclaimed.

“Free trading!” had replied John, grinning at him. “I’m glad I’ve found you at home: I want a bath, and some clean clothes.”

Lord Lichfield had been too much shocked to do more than goggle at him for a full minute. It wasn’t, of course, as bad as John made it sound: the whole affair had been the result of an accident.

“But what I say is this, Fanny!” had complained his lordship later. “If I go sailing, and run into a squall, and have to swim for it, do I get picked up by a smuggling-vessel? Of course I don’t! No one but John would be! What’s more, no one but John would finish the voyage with a set of cut-throat rascals, or help them to land their kegs! And if it had happened to me, I shouldn’t be alive to tell the tale: they’d have knocked me on the head, and dropped me overboard.”

“I cannot conceive how it comes about that he was spared.’” Fanny had said. “Oh, I wish he would not do such things!”

“Yes,” agreed her lord. “Though, mind you, he’s very well able to take care of himself.”

“But in the power of a whole crew of smugglers!”

“I expect they liked him.”

“Liked him?”

“Well, you can’t help liking him!” pointed out his lordship. “He’s a very charming fellow—and I wish to God he’d settle down, and stop kicking up these larks!”

“Mama is right!” declared Fanny. “We must find him an eligible wife!”

Candidate after candidate for this post did Fanny and her mama find, and cunningly throw in John’s way. Apparently he liked them—all of them. This one was a most conversible girl, that one seemed to him a very lively girl, another a remarkably pretty girl. But he asked none of them to marry him. When his sister ventured to ask him once if he had ever been in love, he had replied quite seriously, Yes: he rather thought he had been desperately in love with the lodgekeeper’s wife, who used to regale him with brandy-snaps, and allowed him to keep in a hutch outside her kitchen-door the ferrets Mama had so much disliked.

Was that all? had demanded an exasperated sister. No, there had been a girl in Lisbon, when he first joined. Juanita, or was it Conchita? He couldn’t remember, but at all events she was the loveliest creature you ever saw. Dark, of course, and with the biggest eyes, and such a well-turned ankle! Had he been in love with her? “Lord, yes!” replied John. “We all were!”

He admitted that it was time he was thinking of getting married: not, of course, to Fanny, but to Mama. “Well, I know, Mama,” he said apologetically. “But the thing is I’ve got no fancy for one of these dashed suitable marriages, where you don’t really care a fig for the girl, or she for you. I don’t mean to offer marriage to any girl who don’t give me a leveller. So I daresay I shall remain a bachelor, for they don’t—any of ’em! And if one did,” he added thoughtfully, “it’s Lombard Street to a China orange you wouldn’t take to her!”

“Dearest boy, I should take to any girl whom you loved!” declared Mrs. Staple.