“Did you intend that insult for me, Francis Levison?”

“As you please to take it,” returned he, calling up insolence to his aid.

“You dare to lift off your hat to me!  Have you forgotten that I am Miss Carlyle?”

“It would be difficult for you to be forgotten, once seen.”

Now this answer was given in mockery; his tone and manner were redolent of it, insolently so.  The two gentlemen looked on in discomfort, wondering what it meant; Lady Isabel hid her face as best she could, terrified to death lest his eyes should fall on it:  while the spectators, several of whom had collected now, listened with interest, especially some farm laborers of Squire Pinner’s who had happened to be passing.

“You contemptible worm!” cried Miss Carlyle, “do you think you can outrage me with impunity as you, by your presence in it, are outraging West Lynne?  Out upon you for a bold, bad man!”

Now Miss Corny, in so speaking, had certainly no thought of present and immediate punishment for the gentleman; but it appeared that the mob around had.  The motion was commented by those stout-shouldered laborers.  Whether excited thereto by the words of Miss Carlyle—­who, whatever may have been her faults of manner, held the respect of the neighborhood, and was looked up to only in a less degree than her brother; whether Squire Pinner, their master, had let drop, in their hearing, a word of the ducking he had hinted at, when at East Lynne, or whether their own feelings alone spurred them on, was best known to the men themselves.  Certain it is, that the ominous sound of “Duck him,” was breathed forth by a voice, and it was caught up and echoed around.

“Duck him!  Duck him!  The pond be close at hand.  Let’s give him a taste of his deservings!  What do he the scum, turn himself up at West Lynne for, bearding Mr. Carlyle?  What have he done with Lady Isabel? Him put up for others at West Lynne!  West Lynne’s respectable, it don’t want him; it have got a better man; it won’t have a villain.  Now, lads!”

His face turned white, and he trembled in his shoes—­worthless men are frequently cowards.  Lady Isabel trembled in hers; and well she might, hearing that one allusion.  They set upon him, twenty pairs of hands at least, strong, rough, determined hands; not to speak of the tagrag’s help, who went in with cuffs, and kicks, and pokes, and taunts, and cheers, and a demoniac dance.

They dragged him through a gap in the hedge, a gap that no baby could have got through in a cool moment; but most of us know the difference between coolness and excitement.  The hedge was extensively damaged, but Justice Hare, to whom it belonged, would forgive that.  Mr. Drake and the lawyer—­for the other was a lawyer—­were utterly powerless to stop the catastrophe.  “If they didn’t mind their own business, and keep themselves clear, they’d get served the same,” was the promise