, before he spoke to his friends: 'I've
brought him safe; had him under my eye the last four and twenty hours.
He'll do the trick to-day. You don't bet?'

'Oh! my lord, no.'

'Help the lady down. Out with you, Ines!'

The light-legged barge-faced man touched ground capering. He was greeted
'Kit' by the pair of gentlemen, who shook hands with him, after he had
faintly simulated the challenge to a jig with Madge. She flounced from
him, holding her arms up to the lady. Landlord, landlady, and hostler
besought the lady to stay for the fixing of a ladder. Carinthia stepped,
leaped, and entered the inn, Fleetwood remarking:

'We are very independent, Chummy Potts.'

'Cordy bally, by Jove!' Potts cried. But the moment after this
disengaged ejaculation, he was taken with a bewilderment. 'At the
Opera?' he questioned of his perplexity.

'No, sir, not at the Opera,' Fleetwood rejoined. 'The lady's last public
appearance was at the altar.'

'Sort of a suspicion of having seen her somewhere. Left her husband
behind, has she?'

'You see: she has gone in.'

The scoring of a proposition of Euclid on the forehead of Potts amused
him and the other gentleman, who was hailed 'Mallard!' and cared nothing
for problems involving the female of man when such work was to the fore
as the pugilistic encounter of the Earl of Fleetwood's chosen Kit Ines,
with Lord Brailstone's unbeaten and well-backed Ben Todds.

Ines had done pretty things from the age of seventeen to his
twenty-third year. Remarkably clever things they were, to be called
great in the annals of the Ring. The point, however, was, that the
pockets of his backers had seriously felt his latest fight. He received
a dog's licking at the hands of Lummy Phelps, his inferior in skill,
fighting two to one of the odds; and all because of his fatal addiction
to the breaking of his trainer's imposed fast in liquids on, the night
before the battle. Right through his training, up to that hour, the
rascal was devout; the majority's money rattled all on the snug safe
side. And how did he get at the bottle? His trainers never could say.
But what made him turn himself into a headlong ass, when he had only
to wait a night to sit among friends and worshippers drinking off his
tumbler upon tumbler with the honours? It was past his wits to explain.
Endurance of his privation had snapped in him; or else, which is more
likely, this Genius of the Ring was tempted by his genius on the summit
of