Charles’s mother gently reproved him for the violence he had used, and his sister said he was very hardhearted. But the carriage turned the corner near the Rue Debilly; and as they drew up at their own gate, Mr Thorpe, bareheaded, followed by Sir Godfrey, came eagerly out. They had been getting very anxious indeed. The tutor had missed the Baronet, whom business had detained a little later than his expectation, so that he had left the city by a different barrier, then had turned, fancying the carriage already past; while Mr Thorpe had ridden nearly all the way home alone, then back, till he met Sir Godfrey.
CHAP. VII.—THE DILIGENCE OF SIR GODFREY.
“Norfolk. ‘——We may outrun,
By violent swiftness, that which we run at,
And lose by over-running——’
Buckingham. ‘——by intelligence,
And proofs as clear as founts in July, when
We see each grain of gravel, I do know——’”
Shakespeare.
The Baronet had no sooner written his necessary correspondence that forenoon, and conveyed it, almost as necessarily, with his own hands to the post-office at the British Embassy, than he had turned bridle again toward the Quais, to ride in the direction of the Cité, where it seemed that, after all, the intended legatee of his brother had only exchanged one obscure place of abode for another—48 Rue Chrétienne, au cinquième, in fact, for au septième, numo. 80, Rue de la Vierge. He found himself ere long plunged into the centre of that strange heart of a no less strange quarter. He had no sooner found the number he was in search of, than a couple of little sharp-eyed, old-faced gamins, engaged in some game of chance in a doorway, were ready to hold his horse, with a jealousy of each other which was a guarantee for their joint fidelity.