‘Danger?’ Sir George answered, with cruel relish—­he had gone to the window, and was looking out.  ’Well, I should say that Madam Venus there would certainly have to stand shot.  If you are wise you will put out some of those candles.  They are entering the lane now.  Gad, Tommy, if they think your lad of spirit is here, I would not give much for your window-glass!’

Mr. Thomasson, who had hastened to take the advice, and had extinguished all the candles but one, thus reducing the room to partial darkness, wrung his hands and moaned for answer.  ‘Where are the proctors?’ he said.  ’Where are the constables?  Where are the—­Oh, dear, dear, this is dreadful!’

And certainly, even in a man of firmer courage a little trepidation might have been pardoned.  As the unseen crowd, struggling and jostling, poured from the roadway of St. Aldate’s into the narrow confines of Pembroke Lane, the sound of its hooting gathered sudden volume, and from an intermittent murmur, as of a remote sea, swelled in a moment into a roar of menace.  And as a mob is capable of deeds from which the members who compose it would severally shrink, as nothing is so pitiless, nothing so unreasoning, so in the sound of its voice is a note that appals all but the hardiest.  Soane was no coward.  A year before he had been present at the siege of Bedford House by the Spitalfields weavers, where swords were drawn and much blood was spilled, while the gentlemen of the clubs and coffee-houses looked on as at a play; but even he felt a slackening of the pulse as he listened.  And with the Reverend Frederick it was different.  He was not framed for danger.  When the smoking glare of the links which the ringleaders carried began to dance and flicker on the opposite houses, he looked about him with a wild eye, and had already taken two steps towards the door, when it opened.

It admitted two men about Sir George’s age, or a little younger.  One, after glancing round, passed hurriedly to the window and looked out; the other sank into the nearest chair, and, fanning himself with his hat, muttered a querulous oath.

‘My dear lord!’ cried the Reverend Frederick, hastening to his side—­and it is noteworthy that he forgot even his panic in the old habit of reverence—­’What an escape!  To think that a life so valuable as your lordship’s should lie at the mercy of those wretches!  I shudder at the thought of what might have happened.’

‘Fan me, Tommy’ was the answer.  And Lord Almeric, an excessively pale, excessively thin young man, handed his hat with a gesture of exhaustion to the obsequious tutor.  ’Fan me; that is a good soul.  Positively I am suffocated with the smell of those creatures!  Worse than horses, I assure you.  There, again!  What a pother about a common fellow!  ’Pon honour, I don’t know what the world is coming to!’

‘Nor I,’ Mr. Thomasson answered, hanging over him with assiduity and concern on his countenance.  ‘It is not to be comprehended.’