e
misunderstood by their object. All this Dick saw, and seeing, grew
more and more disgusted with life in general, with Lady Goldthred's
breakfast in particular. When the dance ended, and Dick
Stanmore--hovering about his flame, like the poor moth to which I have
compared him, once singed and eager to be singed again--was hesitating
as to whether he, too, should not go boldly in and try his chance,
behold Mr. Ryfe, with an offensive air of appropriation, walks off
with Miss Bruce arm-in-arm, towards the sequestered path that leads
to the garden-gate, that leads to the shady lane, that leads to the
shining river!

It was all labour and sorrow now. People who called this sort of thing
amusement, thought Dick, would go to purgatory for pastime, and a
stage farther for diversion. When he broke poor Redwing's back three
fields from home in the Melton steeplechase he was grieved, annoyed,
distressed. When he lost that eleven-pounder in the shallows below
Melrose, because "Aundry," his Scottish henchman, was too drunk to
keep his legs in a running stream, he was angry, vexed, disgusted; but
never before, in his whole life of amusement and adventure, had he
experienced anything like the combination of uncomfortable feelings
that oppressed him now. He was ashamed of his own weakness, too, all
the time, which only made matters worse.

"Hang it!" thought Dick, "I don't see why I should punish myself by
staying here any longer. I'll tell my mother I must be back in London
to dinner, make my bow, jump into a boat, and scull down to Chelsea.
So I will. The scull will do me good, and if--if she _has_ gone on the
water with that snob, why I shall know the worst. What a strange, odd
girl she is! And O, how I wish she wasn't!"

But it takes time to find a lady, even of Mrs. Stanmore's presence,
amongst five hundred of her kind jostled up in half-an-acre of ground;
neither will the present code of good manners, liberal as it is,
bear a guest out in walking up to his hostess _a bout portant_, to
interrupt her in an interesting conversation, by bidding her a solemn
good-bye hours before anybody else has begun to move. Twenty minutes
at least must have elapsed ere Dick found himself in a dainty
outrigger with a long pair of sculls, fairly launched on the bosom of
the Thames--more than time for the corsair, if corsair he should be,
to have sailed far out of sight with false, consenting Maud in the
direction of London Bridge.

Dick was n