Dick had been dining _tete-a-tete_ with Keene on the previous evening after a hard day's snipe shooting, and bore evident traces about him of a heavy night--a fact which he lost no time in alluding to, not without a certain pride, like the man in Congreve's play, who exults in having "been drunk in excellent company." "We had a very big drink," he said, confidentially, "and the major got more than his allowance. He didn't know what he was talking about at last, and he told me more of his affairs than most people know, I think; of course, I'm as safe as a church;" and Dick made a gallant but abortive attempt to wink with one of his swollen eyelids. Molyneux shrank away from the speaker with something very like a suppressed groan--he had heard _that_ said before, and remembered what came of it. Credulity was as dangerous when men thought Royston Keene had lost his head as when women flattered themselves he had lost his heart. CHAPTER XIV. If you will be good enough to look back on the one romance in which, like the rest of the world, you probably indulged yourself, you will remember, perhaps more distinctly than any other feature, the _presentiment_ which haunted you from the very beginning. We were absurdly sanguine and hopeful in those days--full of chivalrous resolves and unlimited aspirations; but still the feeling would come back--if, indeed, it ever left us--that in the dim background there was difficulty and danger. We were not surprised when the small white speck rose out of the sea, and it needed no prophet to tell us then that the heavens would soon be black with clouds, and that there would be a great rain (which, indeed, was the case, for there ensued a long continuance of wet weather; it was a very tearful season). Oddly enough, that same presentiment did not make us particularly melancholy or uncomfortable, but seemed rather to give a zest to our simple pleasures, relieving them from any tinge of sameness or insipidity. When the _denouement_ came we did not exactly see things in the same light certainly, and it took some time to settle thoroughly down into our present theory, that "it was all for the best."