When he had sat thus ten minutes, smiling at intervals, a stir about the door announced that his companions were returning.  The landlord preceded them, and was rewarded for his pains with half a guinea; the crowd with a shower of small silver.  The postillions cracked their whips, the horses started forward, and amid a shrill hurrah my lord’s carriage rolled away from the door.

‘Now, who casts?’ the peer cried briskly, arranging himself in his seat.  ‘George, I’ll set you.  The old stakes?’

‘No, I am done for to-night,’ Sir George answered yawning without disguise.

‘What! crabbed, dear lad?’

‘Ay, set Berkeley, my lord.  He’s a better match for you.’

’And be robbed by the first highwayman we meet?  No, no!  I told you, if I was to go down to this damp hole of mine—­fancy living a hundred miles from White’s!  I should die if I could not game every day—­you were to play with me, and Berkeley was to ensure my purse.’

‘He would as soon take it,’ Sir George answered languidly, gazing through the glass.

‘Sooner, by—!’ cried the third traveller, a saturnine, dark-faced man of thirty-four or more, who sat with his back to the horses, and toyed with a pistol that lay on the seat beside him.  ’I’m content if your lordship is.’

’Then have at you!  Call the main, Colonel.  You may be the devil among the highwaymen—­that was Selwyn’s joke, was it not?—­but I’ll see the colour of your money.’

‘Beware of him.  He doved March,’ Sir George said indifferently.

‘He won’t strip me,’ cried the young lord.  ’Five is the main.  Five to four he throws crabs!  Will you take, George?’

Soane did not answer, and the two, absorbed in the rattle of the dice and the turns of their beloved hazard, presently forgot him; his lordship being the deepest player in London and as fit a successor to the luckless Lord Mountford as one drop of water to another.  Thus left to himself, and as effectually screened from remark as if he sat alone, Sir George devoted himself to an eager scrutiny of the night, looking first through one window and then through the other; in which he persevered though darkness had fallen so completely that only the hedges showed in the lamplight, gliding giddily by in endless walls of white.  On a sudden he dropped the glass with an exclamation, and thrust out his head.

‘Pull up!’ he cried.  ‘I want to descend.’

The young lord uttered a peevish exclamation.  ‘What is to do?’ he continued, glancing round; then, instantly returning to the dice, ’if it is my purse they want, say Berkeley is here.  That will scare them.  What are you doing, George?’

‘Wait a minute,’ was the answer; and in a twinkling Soane was out, and was ordering the servant, who had climbed down, to close the door.  This effected, he strode back along the road to a spot where a figure, cloaked, and hooded, was just visible, lurking on the fringe of the lamplight.  As he approached it, he raised his hat with an exaggeration of politeness.