es they had driven to their separate destinations; Ripton was left
to the unusual exercise of his fancy. Such is the nature of youth and
its thirst for romance, that only to act as a subordinate is pleasant.
When one unfurls the standard of defiance to parents and guardians,
he may be sure of raising a lawless troop of adolescent ruffians, born
rebels, to any amount. The beardless crew know that they have not a
chance of pay; but what of that when the rosy prospect of thwarting
their elders is in view? Though it is to see another eat the Forbidden
Fruit, they will run all his risks with him. Gaily Ripton took rank as
lieutenant in the enterprise, and the moment his heart had sworn the
oaths, he was rewarded by an exquisite sense of the charms of existence.
London streets wore a sly laugh to him. He walked with a dandified heel.
The generous youth ogled aristocratic carriages, and glanced intimately
at the ladies, overflowingly happy. The crossing-sweepers blessed
him. He hummed lively tunes, he turned over old jokes in his mouth
unctuously, he hugged himself, he had a mind to dance down Piccadilly,
and all because a friend of his was running away with a pretty girl, and
he was in the secret.

It was only when he stood on the doorstep of Richard's hotel, that
his jocund mood was a little dashed by remembering that he had then to
commence the duties of his office, and must fabricate a plausible story
to account for what he knew nothing about--a part that the greatest of
sages would find it difficult to perform. The young, however, whom sages
well may envy, seldom fail in lifting their inventive faculties to the
level of their spirits, and two minutes of Hippias's angry complaints
against the friend he serenely inquired for, gave Ripton his cue.

"We're in the very street--within a stone's-throw of the house, and he
jumps like a harlequin out of my cab into another; he must be
mad--that boy's got madness in him!--and carries off all the boxes--my
dinner-pills, too! and keeps away the whole of the day, though he
promised to go to the doctor, and had a dozen engagements with me," said
Hippias, venting an enraged snarl to sum up his grievances.

Ripton at once told him that the doctor was not at home.

"Why, you don't mean to say he's been to the doctor?" Hippias cried out.

"He has called on him twice, sir," said Ripton, expressively. "On
leaving me he was going a third time. I shouldn't wonder that's what
detains him--h