altitude he shook a dolorous head at the guilty woman. She smoothed
her excited apron, sighing. Let no one imagine that she regretted her
complicity. She was ready to cry torrents, but there must be absolute
castigation before this criminal shall conceive the sense of regret;
and probably then she will cling to her wickedness the more--such is the
born Pagan's tenacity! Mrs. Berry sighed, and gave him back his shake of
the head. O you wanton, improvident creature! said he. O you very wise
old gentleman! said she. He asked her the thing she had been doing. She
enlightened him with the fatalist's reply. He sounded a bogey's alarm
of contingent grave results. She retreated to the entrenched camp of the
fact she had helped to make.

"It's done!" she exclaimed. How could she regret what she felt comfort
to know was done? Convinced that events alone could stamp a mark on such
stubborn flesh, he determined to wait for them, and crouched silent on
the cake, with one finger downwards at Ripton's incision there, showing
a crumbling chasm and gloomy rich recess.

The eloquent indication was understood. "Dear! dear!" cried Mrs. Berry,
"what a heap o' cake, and no one to send it to!"

Ripton had resumed his seat by the table and his embrace of the claret.
Clear ideas of satisfaction had left him and resolved to a boiling
geysir of indistinguishable transports. He bubbled, and waggled, and
nodded amicably to nothing, and successfully, though not without
effort, preserved his uppermost member from the seductions of the nymph,
Gravitation, who was on the look-out for his whole length shortly.

"Ha! ha!" he shouted, about a minute after Mrs. Berry had spoken, and
almost abandoned himself to the nymph on the spot. Mrs. Berry's words
had just reached his wits.

"Why do you laugh, young man?" she inquired, familiar and motherly on
account of his condition.

Ripton laughed louder, and caught his chest on the edge of the table and
his nose on a chicken. "That's goo'!" he said, recovering, and rocking
under Mrs. Berry's eyes. "No friend!"

"I did not say, no friend," she remarked. "I said, no one; meanin', I
know not where for to send it to."

Ripton's response to this was: "You put a Griffin on that cake.
Wheatsheaves each side."

"His crest?" Mrs. Berry said sweetly.

"Oldest baronetcy 'n England!" waved Ripton.

"Yes?" Mrs. Berry encouraged him on.

"You think he's Richards. We're oblige' be very close. And she's the
most l