Left to himself, the Colonel took to pacing up and down the library with great strides. He was evidently labouring under great annoyance; he bit his lips and tossed his head in the air, and muttered to himself as he walked up and down. "That fellow struck the right note at last," he said. "Insolent brute! All that palaver about honest man's fireside, and children calling her mother, and that kind of thing, one has heard a thousand times; but if all happened as he prophesied--and I confess it is the usual ending to such things--and he made a row as he threatened, it would be deuced unpleasant. He is right about the Lothario business being over; and more than right about people grinning at you when you are mixed up in such matters at fifty years of age. And if it were to come to what he suggested, death and that kind of thing, there would probably be a great row. Those infernal newspaper paragraphs about the heartless seducer--they don't like those things at the Court or the Horse Guards; and then one would have to run the gauntlet of the clubs and that kind of thing. By Jove, it's worth considering whether the game is worth the candle, after all!" At that moment Miss Orpington entered. "Who was that person, papa?" said she. "I thought I heard you speak quite angrily to him." "Very likely, my dear," said the Colonel; "he was a very impertinent and unmannerly person from--from those confoundedly troublesome slate-quarries and lead-mines in South Wales." CHAPTER XXVIII. DAISY'S LETTER. Left to himself, without George Wainwright to listen to his complaints, to afford him consolation, or even to do him good by the administration of the rough tonic of his advice, Paul Derinzy had a very bad time of it. His attendance at the office was exceedingly irregular; and when he was there he was so preoccupied and _distrait_, that he would not look after his work; which accordingly, there being no George Wainwright to stay after hours and pull it up, went hopelessly into arrears. The good old chief, Mr. Courtney, always inclined to be kind and indulgent, and more especially disposed to civility since he had been to dine with Paul's people in Queen Anne Street (where he found the Captain "a devilish gentleman-like fellow, sir; far superior to the men of the present day, with a remarkable fund of anecdote"), had his patience and his temper very much tried by his young friend's peculiar proceedings; and between the two other occupants of the principal registrar's room, Mr. William Dunlop's life was pretty nearly harried out of him.