no internal trouble or distraction. "The letters of a healthful
physique!" he said to Lady Blandish, with sure insight. Complacently he
sat and smiled, little witting that his son's ordeal was imminent, and
that his son's ordeal was to be his own. Hippias wrote that his nephew
was killing him by making appointments which he never kept, and
altogether neglecting him in the most shameless way, so that his
ganglionic centre was in a ten times worse state than when he left
Raynham. He wrote very bitterly, but it was hard to feel compassion for
his offended stomach.

On the other hand, young Tom Blaize was not forthcoming, and had
despatched no tidings whatever. Farmer Blaize smoked his pipe evening
after evening, vastly disturbed. London was a large place--young Tom
might be lost in it, he thought; and young Tom had his weaknesses. A
wolf at Belthorpe, he was likely to be a sheep in London, as yokels have
proved. But what had become of Lucy? This consideration almost sent
Farmer Blaize off to London direct, and he would have gone had not his
pipe enlightened him. A young fellow might play truant and get into a
scrape, but a young man and a young woman were sure to be heard of,
unless they were acting in complicity. Why, of course, young Tom had
behaved like a man, the rascal! and married her outright there, while he
had the chance. It was a long guess. Still it was the only reasonable
way of accounting for his extraordinary silence, and therefore the farmer
held to it that he had done the deed. He argued as modern men do who
think the hero, the upsetter of ordinary calculations, is gone from us.
So, after despatching a letter to a friend in town to be on the outlook
for son Tom, he continued awhile to smoke his pipe, rather elated than
not, and mused on the shrewd manner he should adopt when Master Honeymoon
did appear.