All this was unhappy, unhealthy business. Why return for such life as this? He began to talk with Granby of their journeys and their hunts proposed; but Granby, who, perforce, had become a Stoic, hopeless of any return to his happy happiness, satisfied himself very well where he was. There were snipe and plover to be bagged; the bay still yielded as good fish as had ever been taken. All the ladies who rode were ready to be companioned by so distinguished a cavalier. All who drove thought him an agreeable and decorative object on the front seats of the drivers’ drags. He knew all the catsmen of the docks. At every yachting party he, as well as Waddy, was an indispensable. He bathed; he danced; he astonished people at late, sleepy breakfasts by coming in with vast appetite from seven-league walks and presenting this pallid danseuse of the last night’s hop with a wild rosebud from a hill a dozen miles away, or that weary, nightless, ballful dowager with a creamy, new-laid egg. He held his own at the club, at billiards with the three ponies of the summer: with Mr. Skibbereen, the cool, cautious man and dashing player: with Blinders, the dashing man and accurate, mathematical player: with Bob O’Link, the sentimental man and nonchalant player. Poor Bob O’Link used to hum lugubrious airs, such as the serenade from “Trovatore,” and sigh to Granby, particularly when he made a scratch, that a man whose destiny it was to be a poet could only attain to billiard-marker results. “I’m too lucky,” said Bob O’, “to lose money. Then I might grow poor and work. But I’m like Cæsar--wasn’t it _Cæsar aut nullus_?--everything I touch turns to gold.” And then he would make a lunging stroke that the tyros talked of all summer. “Poor fellow!” said Granby. “You have reason to be a disappointed man. I’ve known whole families in the same condition. You’ll have to marry a strong-minded woman and learn to run a sewing machine.” “I don’t see any strong-minded women,” replied Link, looking into an empty chalk-cup for chalk. “There’s Miss Anthrope,” suggested Granby. “Besides, Peter Skerrett says it’s one of the oldest and most respectable families. They came in, did the Anthropes, with the creation. Marry her.” “Now you mention it, I believe I will,” cried Bob; and he did. And Miss Anthrope, now Mrs. O’Link, is one of the lights of the woman’s question, while Bob O’ is really happy at home in a cradle Elysium, and would not give an obolus to be ferried back to the mundane joys of his former life. Major Granby was thus, in truth, useful as well as agreeable, and with the feelings of a man who is doing his duty towards himself and incidentally towards others, including his protégé, Ambient, he determined to keep Mr. Waddy at Newport.