He was setting foot on the jetty, discomfortable in the conviction that his present demoralisation was offering itself the target to a hail of local wit, when a thin neigh of a laugh that issued from a yellow curricle drawn up near at hand drew his peevish attention. Immediately he fetched his nausea under control, and stepped towards the carriage with a fine assumption of coolness. There may have appeared that in his attitude to induce a respectable manservant to jump from the dickey and offer to bar his progress. “All right, Jepps,” said he. “I’m not one of ‘Peg Nicholson’s knights’ with a petition.” The man bowed and made way for him. “I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Edward,” said he, and added in an accommodating voice, “I’d little call to know you, sir.” “Eh, what? Ned!” gasped one of the occupants of the curricle, no other than the Right Honourable the Viscount Murk indeed. His lordship sat on and forward of a great cloak lined with silver fox-skin (a luxurious cave into which he could withdraw whenever a draught nosed his old sapless limbs), the neck-clasp of which he had unhooked for the display of a diamond brooch that gathered voluminous lawn about the sagging of his throat. In every detail of his condition he was the bowelless and mummified coxcomb, packed prematurely into exquisite cerements, predestined to a corner in the museums of limbo; and topping his finished refinements of costume, his beaver was tilted like an acute accent to so distinguished an expression of hyperdynamic foppery. “You are surprised to see me, sir,” said Ned (he glanced as he spoke with something like astonishment at my lord’s companion); “nor I much less to find you here. As for myself, I have gleaned such a harvest of experience in a few months that I must needs come home to store it.” His uncle stared at him, but with a rallying expression of implacable distaste. “Rat me!” he said candidly; “I’d hoped to hear of you a martyr to your theories, and that manstrous Encyclopedia set up for your tombstone.” He turned indolently to his companion. “This is the heir to ‘Stowling’ and the viscounty and all the rest of the beggarly show, if he can be induced to candescend to it,” he said viciously, and gathered up the reins in his lemon-gloved hands. The other nodded, with a pretty display of white teeth and a shifting affectation that was extravagantly feminine. A dainty three-cornered hat was perched on her powdered hair, that was pulled up plainly and rolled over each temple in a silken ringlet. She had on a richly embroidered jacket with wide lapels; a rug was over her knees; and seated on it, fastened to her left wrist by a tiny golden chain, was a red monkey that chattered at the new-comer.