beautiful creature the best of his three sisters (partly, it may be,
because he despised her superior officer), and tried with a few smothered
words to induce her to accompany him: but she only shook her fair locks
and moaned afresh. Mr. Andrew, in the farewell squeeze of the hand at the
street-door, asked him if he wanted anything. He negatived the
requirement of anything whatever, with an air of careless decision,
though he was aware that his purse barely contained more than would take
him the distance, but the instincts of this amateur gentleman were very
fine and sensitive on questions of money. His family had never known him
beg for a shilling, or admit his necessity for a penny: nor could he be
made to accept money unless it was thrust into his pocket. Somehow his
sisters had forgotten this peculiarity of his. Harriet only remembered it
when too late.

'But I dare say Andrew has supplied him,' she said.

Andrew being interrogated, informed her what had passed between them.

'And you think a Harrington would confess he wanted money!' was her
scornful exclamation. 'Evan would walk--he would die rather. It was
treating him like a mendicant.'

Andrew had to shrink in his brewer's skin.

By some fatality all who were doomed to sit and listen to the Countess de
Saldar, were sure to be behindhand in an appointment.

When the young man arrived at the coach-office, he was politely informed
that the vehicle, in which a seat had been secured for him, was in close
alliance with time and tide, and being under the same rigid laws, could
not possibly have waited for him, albeit it had stretched a point to the
extent of a pair of minutes, at the urgent solicitation of a passenger.

'A gentleman who speaks so, sir,' said a volunteer mimic of the office,
crowing and questioning from his throat in Goren's manner. 'Yok! yok!
That was how he spoke, sir.'

Evan reddened, for it brought the scene on board the Jocasta vividly to
his mind. The heavier business obliterated it. He took counsel with the
clerks of the office, and eventually the volunteer mimic conducted him to
certain livery stables, where Evan, like one accustomed to command,
ordered a chariot to pursue the coach, received a touch of the hat for a
lordly fee, and was soon rolling out of London.

CHAPTER VI

MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD

The postillion had every reason to believe that he carried a real
gentleman behind him; in other words, a purse long and libe