The gentleman who had spoken before drowned his voice.  ’Will this do, sir?’ he said, raising his hat, and addressing Sir George.  The party had reached a smooth glade or lawn encompassed by thick shrubs, and to all appearance a hundred miles from a street.  A fairy-ring of verdure, glittering with sunlight and dewdrops, and tuneful with the songs of birds, it seemed a morsel of paradise dropped from the cool blue of heaven.  Sir George felt a momentary tightening of the throat as he surveyed its pure brilliance, and then a sudden growing anger against the fool who had brought him thither.

‘You have no second?’ said the stranger.

‘No,’ he answered curtly; ‘I think we have witnesses enough.’

‘Still—­if the matter can be accommodated?’

‘It can,’ Soane answered, standing stiffly before them.  ’But only by an unreserved apology on Mr. Dunborough’s part.  He struck me.  I have no more to say.’

‘I do not offer the apology,’ Mr. Dunborough rejoined, with a horse-laugh.  ’So we may as well go on, Jerry.  I did not come here to talk.’

‘I have brought pistols,’ his second said, disregarding the sneer.  ’But my principal, though the challenged party, is willing to waive the choice of weapons.’

‘Pistols will do for me,’ Sir George answered.

‘One shot, at a word.  If ineffective, you will take to your swords,’ the second continued; and he pushed back his wig and wiped his forehead, as if his employment were not altogether to his taste.  A duel was a fine thing—­at a distance.  He wished, however, that he had some one with whom to share the responsibility, now it was come to the point; and he cast a peevish look at Lord Almeric.  But his lordship was, as he had candidly said, ‘all of a twitter,’ and offered no help.

‘I suppose that I am to load,’ the unlucky second continued.  ’That being so, you, Sir George, must have the choice of pistols.’

Sir George bowed assent, and, going a little aside, removed his hat, wig, and cravat; and was about to button his coat to his throat, when he observed that Mr. Dunborough was stripping to his shirt.  Too proud not to follow the example, though prudence suggested that the white linen made him a fair mark, he stripped also, and in a trice the two, kicking off their shoes, moved to the positions assigned to them; and in their breeches and laced lawn shirts, their throats bare, confronted one another.

‘Sir George, have you no one to represent you?’ cried the second again, grown querulous under the burden.  His name, it seemed, was Morris.  He was a major in the Oxfordshire Militia.

Soane answered with impatience.  ‘I have no second,’ he said, ’but my surgeon will be a competent witness.’

‘Ah! to be sure!’ Major Morris answered, with a sigh of relief.  ’That is so.  Then, gentlemen, I shall give the signal by saying One, two, three!  Be good enough to fire together at the word Three!  Do you understand?’