ances. I was in love with the modest shadowed life Temple
lived, diligently reading, and glancing on the world as through a dusky
window, happy to let it run its course while he sharpened his weapons. A
look at Temple's face told me he had heard quite as much as was known in
the West. Dining-halls of lawyers are not Cistercian; he was able to give
me three distinct versions of the story of the Dauphin. No one could be
friendlier. Indeed Temple now urged me forcibly to prevent my father from
spending money and wearing his heart out in vain, by stopping the case in
Dettermain and Newson's hands. They were respectable lawyers, he said, in
a lawyer's ordinary tone when including such of his species as are not
black sheep. He thought it possible that my father's personal influence
overbore their judgment. In fact, nothing bound them to refuse to work
for him, and he believed that they had submitted their views for his
consideration.

'I do wish he'd throw it up,' Temple exclaimed. 'It makes him enemies.
And just examining it, you see he could get no earthly good out of it: he
might as well try to scale a perpendicular rock. But when I'm with him,
I'm ready to fancy what he pleases--I acknowledge that. He has excess of
phosphorus, or he's ultra-electrical; doctors could tell us better than
lawyers.' Temple spoke of the clever young barrister Tenby as the man
whom his father had heard laughing over the trick played upon 'Roy
Richmond.' I conceived that I might furnish Mr. Tenby a livelier kind of
amusement, and the thought that I had once been sur le terrain, and had
bitterly regretted it, by no means deterred me from the idea of a second
expedition, so black was my mood. A review of the circumstances, aided by
what reached my ears before the night went over, convinced me that Edbury
was my man. His subordinate helped him to the instrument, and possibly to
the plot, but Edbury was the capital offender.

The scene of the prank was not in itself so bad as the stuff which a
cunning anecdotist could make out of it. Edbury invited my father to a
dinner at a celebrated City tavern. He kept his guests (Jennings, Jorian
DeWitt, Alton, Wedderburn, were among the few I was acquainted with who
were present) awaiting the arrival of a person for whom he professed
extraordinary respect. The Dauphin of France was announced. A mild,
flabby, amiable-looking old person, with shelving forehead and grey
locks--excellently built for the object, Jo