I always said it—­when stripped for boxing.  Hats are gentlemen’s things, and becomes them like as if a title to their heads; though you’d bear being Sir Robert, that you would; and for that matter, your hat is agreeable to behold, and not like the run of our Sunday hats; only you don’t seem easy in it.  Oh, oh! my tongue’s a yard too long.  It’s the poor head aching, and me to forget it.  It’s because you never will act invalidy; and I remember how handsome you were one day in the field behind our house, when you boxed a wager with Simon Billet, the waterman; and you was made a bet of then, for my husband betted on you; and that’s what made me think of comparisons of you out of your hat and you in it.”

Thus did Mrs. Boulby chatter along the way.  There was an eminence a little out of the road, overlooking the Fairly stables.  Robert left her and went to this point, from whence he beheld the horsemen with the grooms at the horses’ heads.

“Thank God, I’ve only been a fool for five minutes!” he summed up his sensations at the sight.  He shut his eyes, praying with all his might never to meet Mrs. Lovell more.  It was impossible for him to combat the suggestion that she had befooled him; yet his chivalrous faith in women led him to believe, that as she knew Dahlia’s history, she would certainly do her best for the poor girl, and keep her word to him.  The throbbing of his head stopped all further thought.  It had become violent.  He tried to gather his ideas, but the effort was like that of a light dreamer to catch the sequence of a dream, when blackness follows close up, devouring all that is said and done.  In despair, he thought with kindness of Mrs. Boulby’s brandy.

“Mother,” he said, rejoining her, “I’ve got a notion brandy can’t hurt a man when he’s in bed.  I’ll go to bed, and you shall brew me some; and you’ll let no one come nigh me; and if I talk light-headed, it’s blank paper and scribble, mind that.”

The widow promised devoutly to obey all his directions; but he had begun to talk light-headed before he was undressed.  He called on the name of a Major Waring, of whom Mrs. Boulby had heard him speak tenderly as a gentleman not ashamed to be his friend; first reproaching him for not being by, and then by the name of Percy, calling to him endearingly, and reproaching himself for not having written to him.

“Two to one, and in the dark!” he kept moaning “and I one to twenty, Percy, all in broad day.  Was it fair, I ask?”

Robert’s outcries became anything but “blank paper and scribble” to the widow, when he mentioned Nic Sedgett’s name, and said:  “Look over his right temple he’s got my mark a second time.”

Hanging by his bedside, Mrs. Boulby strung together, bit by bit, the history of that base midnight attack, which had sent her glorious boy bleeding to her.  Nic Sedgett; she could understand, was the accomplice of one of the Fairly gentlemen; but of which one, she could not discover, and consequently set him down as Mr. Algernon Blancove.