“I hope you don’t mind. He’s waiting in the fly to take me back when we’ve done.”
“I shall go with you. I’m finished here.”
“O, Richard! Will you—will you?”
“Clasp your hands to me, baby. You look as if you were all made of tinted sugar, and I’ve a business not to eat you. There. In spite of everything my heart sings to choke me. How can I ever let you go again! Yes. I’ll telegraph to Shapter when we get to town. An hour ago I felt as if the world had done me; now I feel like a giant for rounding on it. What is your particular power, you weak little thing? Give me your hand. Don’t you remember how I made it carry that pailful of water, beast that I was! It would have served me right if you had dumped it on my toes. Ira, supposing I never made good my claim?”
“What, to me?”
“To you, conceit? No, to the title, I meant, of course.”
“O! I had forgotten. But what does it matter, Richard, so long as we have one another?”
What did it matter, indeed? I ring down the curtain on that unanswerable query.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE GREAT SKENE CASE
You see the heading to this chapter? Your fathers used to see and greet it for many a long day in their newspapers—especially in the evening issues, when a little excitement was needed to beguile the tedious minutes of the journey homeward from the city to Clapham, or Streatham, or Hampstead. How the boys used to shrill it out, decorated with its daily official furbelows, and make their halfpenny profits on that cause célèbre! There may be comfortable newsvendors now who owe their position to the social furore it created. I know that many lifelong friendships, not to speak of heads, were broken in the differences of opinion to which it led. You may unearth the full report of it all, if you will, from the dusty files of ’82. I am not going to be so silly as to retail it to an indifferent generation. Even the great Arthur—great in bulk as in impudence—has shrunk to-day into little more than a buffer for legal precedents. What modern can gauge the force of the contests which raged about the Tichborne or Skene standards, or find himself more than politely interested in the story of the blood spilt and reputations overthrown on those doughty fields?—lost, both, by their claimants, or pretenders; yet, I trust, in one case, an honourable defeat, a few words as to which must now suffice.