Carroll lowered the paper slowly to his knee and stared curiously through the smoky light to where Holcombe sat intent on the rowel of his spur.  It apparently absorbed his entire attention, and his last remark had been an unconsciously natural one.  Carroll smiled grimly as he folded the paper across his knee.  “Now are the mighty fallen, indeed,” he murmured.  He told Meakim of it a few minutes later, and they both marvelled.  “It’s just as I told him, isn’t it, and he wouldn’t believe me.  It’s the place and the people.  Two weeks ago he would have raged.  Why, Meakim, you know Allen—­Winthrop Allen?  He’s one of Holcombe’s own sort; older than he is, but one of his own people; belongs to the same clubs; and to the same family, I think, and yet Harry took it just as a matter of course, with no more interest, than if I’d said that Allen was going to be married.”

Meakim gave a low, comfortable laugh of content.  “It makes me smile,” he chuckled, “every time I think of him the day he came up them stairs.  He scared me half to death, he did, and then he says, just as stiff as you please, ’If you’ll leave me alone, Mr. Meakim, I’ll not trouble you.’  And now it’s ‘Meakim this,’ and ‘Meakim that,’ and ’have a drink, Meakim,’ just as thick as thieves.  I have to laugh whenever I think of it now.  ’If you’ll leave me alone, I’ll not trouble you, Mr. Meakim.’”

Carroll pursed his lips and looked up at the broad expanse of purple heavens with the white stars shining through.  “It’s rather a pity, too, in a way,” he said, slowly.  “He was all the Public Opinion we had, and now that he’s thrown up the part, why—­”

The pig-sticking came to an end finally, and Holcombe distinguished himself by taking his first fall, and under romantic circumstances.  He was in an open place, with Mrs. Carroll at the edge of the brush to his right, and Miss Terrill guarding any approach from the left.  They were too far apart to speak to one another, and sat quite still and alert to any noise as the beaters closed in around them.  There was a sharp rustle in the reeds, and the boar broke out of it some hundred feet ahead of Holcombe.  He went after it at a gallop, headed it off, and ran it fairly on his spear point as it came toward him; but as he drew his lance clear his horse came down, falling across him, and for the instant knocking him breathless.  It was all over in a moment.  He raised his head to see the boar turn and charge him; he saw where his spear point had torn the lower lip from the long tusks, and that the blood was pouring down its flank.  He tried to draw out his legs, but the pony lay fairly across him, kicking and struggling, and held him in a vise.  So he closed his eyes and covered his head with his arms, and crouched in a heap waiting.  There was the quick beat of a pony’s hoofs on the hard soil, and the rush of the boar within a foot of his head, and when he looked up he saw Miss Terrill twisting her pony’s head around to charge the boar again, and heard her shout, “Let me have him!” to Mrs. Carroll.