'No--no more, I thank you. Your lordship's very good, and the wine, I may say, excellent--delicious claret; indeed, quite so--ninety shillings a dozen, I should venture to say, and hardly to be had at that figure; but it grows late, I rather think, and the trustees of our little Wesleyan chapel--we've got a little into debt in that quarter, I am sorry to say--and I promised to advise with them this evening at nine o'clock. They have called me to counsel more than once, poor fellows; and so, with your lordship's permission, I'll withdraw.' Lord Chelford walked with him to the steps. It was a beautiful night--very little moon, but that and the stars wonderfully clear and bright, and all things looking so soft and airy. 'Try one of these,' said the peer, presenting his cigar case. Larkin, with a glow of satisfaction, took one of these noble cigars, and rolled it in his fingers, and smelt it. 'Fragrant--wonderfully fragrant!' he observed, meekly, with a connoisseur's shake of the head. The night was altogether so charming that Lord Chelford was tempted. So he took his cap, and lighted his cigar, too, and strolled a little way with the attorney. He walked under the solemn trees--the same under whose airy groyning Wylder and Lake had walked away together on that noteworthy night on which Mark had last turned his back upon the grand old gables and twisted chimneys of Brandon Hall. This way was rather a round, it must be confessed, to the Lodge--Jos, Larkin's peaceful retreat. But a stroll with a lord was worth more than that sacrifice, and every incident which helped to make a colourable case of confidential relations at Brandon--a point in which the good attorney had been rather weak hitherto--was justly prized by that virtuous man. If the trustees, Smith the pork-butcher, old Captain Snoggles, the Town Clerk, and the rest, had to wait some twenty minutes in the drawing-room at the Lodge, so much the better. An apology was, perhaps, the best and most modest shape into which he could throw the advertisement of his dinner at Brandon--his confidential talk with the proud old dowager, and his after-dinner ramble with that rising young peer, Lord Chelford. It would lead him gracefully into detail, and altogether the idea, the situation, the scene and prospect, were so soothing and charming, that the good attorney felt a silent exaltation as he listened to Lord Chelford's two or three delighted sentences upon the illimitable wonders and mysteries glimmering in the heavens above them.