“All right, Jepps,” said he. “I’m not one of ‘Peg Nicholson’s knights’ with a petition.”
The man bowed and made way for him.
“I’m sure I beg your pardon, Mr Edward,” said he, and added in an accommodating voice, “I’d little call to know you, sir.”
“Eh, what? Ned!” gasped one of the occupants of the curricle, no other than the Right Honourable the Viscount Murk indeed.
His lordship sat on and forward of a great cloak lined with silver fox-skin (a luxurious cave into which he could withdraw whenever a draught nosed his old sapless limbs), the neck-clasp of which he had unhooked for the display of a diamond brooch that gathered voluminous lawn about the sagging of his throat. In every detail of his condition he was the bowelless and mummified coxcomb, packed prematurely into exquisite cerements, predestined to a corner in the museums of limbo; and topping his finished refinements of costume, his beaver was tilted like an acute accent to so distinguished an expression of hyperdynamic foppery.
“You are surprised to see me, sir,” said Ned (he glanced as he spoke with something like astonishment at my lord’s companion); “nor I much less to find you here. As for myself, I have gleaned such a harvest of experience in a few months that I must needs come home to store it.”
His uncle stared at him, but with a rallying expression of implacable distaste.
“Rat me!” he said candidly; “I’d hoped to hear of you a martyr to your theories, and that manstrous Encyclopedia set up for your tombstone.”
He turned indolently to his companion.
“This is the heir to ‘Stowling’ and the viscounty and all the rest of the beggarly show, if he can be induced to candescend to it,” he said viciously, and gathered up the reins in his lemon-gloved hands.