“‘Damn thy fat head,’” shrieked Tom Tantillion, “’If that is thy way to convert women, this is mine to convert men.’  Oh, Lord!  I think I see the parson!”

“With his fat, slapped face and his streaming eyes and bloody nose!” shouted Langford.

“Serve him damn right!” said Tantillion, sobering and wiping his own eyes.  “To put their heads into such hornets’ nests would make a lot of them behave more decent.”  And then he picked up the letter again and made brotherly comments upon it.

“’Tis just like a minx of a girl to think a man cannot see through her spite,” he said.  “Bet is dying to be a woman and have the fellows ogling her.  She is a pretty chit and will be the languishing kind, like the die-away Maddon who is so ‘modist.’  She is thin enough to be made ‘modist’ by it.  No breeches for her, but farthingales and ’modesty pieces’ high enough to graze her chin.  ’Some of their words we did not understand’”—­reading from the letter, and he looked at the company with a large comprehensive wink. “’Her breeding is disgraceful and her langwidge a disgrace to her secks’—­Well, I’ll be hanged if she isn’t a girl after a man’s own heart, if she’s handsome enough to dress like a lad, and has the spirit to ride and leap like one—­and can slap a Chaplain’s face for him when he plays the impudent goat.  Aren’t you of my opinion, Roxholm, for all you don’t laugh as loud as the rest of us?  Aren’t you of my mind?”

“Yes,” said Roxholm, who for a few moments had been gazing at the wall with a somewhat fierce expression.

“Hello!” exclaimed Tantillion, not knowing the meaning of it.  “What are you thinking of?”

Roxholm recovered himself, but his smile was rather a grim one.

“I think of the Chaplain,” he said, “and how I should like to have dealt with him myself—­after young Mistress Wildairs let him go.”

CHAPTER IX

Sir John Oxon Lays a Wager at Cribb’s Coffee House.

This is to be no story of wars and battles, of victories and historic events, such great engines being but touched upon respectfully, as their times and results formed part of the atmosphere of the life of a gentleman of rank who moved in the world affected by them, and among such personages as were most involved in the stirring incidents of their day.  That which is to be told is but the story of a man’s life and the love which was the greatest power in it—­the thing which brought to him the fiercest struggles, the keenest torture, and the most perfect joy.

During the next two years Gerald Mertoun saw some pretty service and much change of scene, making the “grand tour,” as it were, under circumstances more exciting and of more moment to the world at large than is usually the case when a gentleman makes it.  He so acquitted himself on several occasions that England heard of him and prophesied that if my Lord Marlborough’s head were taken off in action there