er
know when I am not looking a fool. I hurry from tree to tree to shun the
light. I am seriously affected in my appetite. I say, I shall have to
go.'

Reginald gave him to understand that if he flew, the shafts would follow
him, for Lady Camper would never forgive his running away, and was quite
equal to publishing a book of the adventures of Wilsonople.

Sunday afternoon, walking in the park with his daughter on his arm,
General Ople met Mr. Rolles. He saw that the young man and Elizabeth were
mortally pale, and as the very idea of wretchedness directed his
attention to himself, he addressed them conjointly on the subject of his
persecution, giving neither of them a chance of speaking until they were
constrained to part.

A sketch was the consequence, in which a withered Cupid and a fading
Psyche were seen divided by Wilsonople, who keeps them forcibly asunder
with policeman's fists, while courteously and elegantly entreating them
to hear him. 'Meet,' he tells them, 'as often as you like, in my company,
so long as you listen to me'; and the pathos of his aspect makes hungry
demand for a sympathetic audience.

Now, this, and not the series representing the martyrdom of the old
couple at Douro Lodge Gates, whose rigid frames bore witness to the close
packing of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General Ople, in
his madness from the pursuing bite of the gadfly, handed about at Mrs.
Pollington's lawn-party. Some have said, that he should not have betrayed
his daughter; but it is reasonable to suppose he had no idea of his
daughter's being the Psyche. Or if he had, it was indistinct, owing to
the violence of his personal emotion. Assuming this to have been the very
sketch; he handed it to two or three ladies in turn, and was heard to
deliver himself at intervals in the following snatches: 'As you like, my
lady, as you like; strike, I say strike; I bear it; I say I bear it.
. . . If her ladyship is unforgiving, I say I am enduring. . . .
I may go, I was saying I may go mad, but while I have my reason I walk
upright, I walk upright.'

Mr. Pollington and certain City gentlemen hearing the poor General's
renewed soliloquies, were seized with disgust of Lady Camper's conduct,
and stoutly advised an application to the Law Courts.

He gave ear to them abstractedly, but after pulling out the whole chapter
of the caricatures (which it seemed that he kept in a case of morocco
leather in his breast-pocket), showing