So, for half an hour, they drove him round the Pavilion lawn, whilst in the porch stood a crowd of revellers laughing and mocking at the helpless old figure inside.
Presently they lifted him out and put him to bed in the Pavilion. He awoke to find himself there in the morning, and the bitterness of that awakening stayed with him to his dying day.
A goodly jest, indeed, for a Prince and gentleman! Yet Florizel, debauchee, gambler, libertine, has his admirers to this day. A rare, merry fellow indeed, this German princeling! A noble ruler for old England later on.
So thought Michael Berrington, bitterly enough, as he sat grim and disapproving at the table till he could bear the spectacle no longer.
Sir Stephen already lay half insensible on the floor—excuse enough for the son to carry an erring father home.
Lord Denningham had his sneers there. As for Morice Conyers and Monsieur Trouet, they were not present, though they had driven to Brighton on Denningham's coach.
Vaguely uneasy was Michael at the absence of those two, coupled with Mollie Cooling's story.
Some plot was stirring beneath the depths, and he remembered that Guy Barton, the kindly friend of his grandfather and now of his own, had told him how Morice Conyers had allowed himself to be mixed up with dangerous and seditious societies.
It is true that every right-minded Englishman cried out in horror when the terrible news of the September massacres in the Parisian prisons reached them. But yet Michael had heard also of the decision of these so-called sympathisers of freedom—the London Corresponding Society and others—to send deputies to the leaders of the Revolution, bearing their congratulations on deeds which were as brutal as they were inhuman.
And not only Morice Conyers, but his own father, were members of this Society.