‘Gentlemen!’ he said:  and said it twice.  The gap was wide, and he said, ‘Gentlemen!’ again.

This commencement of a speech proves that you have made the plunge, but not that you can swim.  At a repetition of ‘Gentlemen!’ expectancy resolved into cynicism.

‘Gie’n a help,’ sang out a son of the plough to a neighbour of the orator.

‘Hang it!’ murmured another, ‘we ain’t such gentlemen as that comes to.’

Mr. Raikes was politely requested to ‘tune his pipe.’

With a gloomy curiosity as to the results of Jack’s adventurous undertaking, and a touch of anger at the three whose bearing throughout had displeased him, Evan regarded his friend.  He, too, had drunk, and upon emptiness.  Bright ale had mounted to his brain.  A hero should be held as sacred as the Grand Llama:  so let no more be said than that he drank still, nor marked the replenishing of his glass.

Raikes cleared his throat for a final assault:  he had got an image, and was dashing off; but, unhappily, as if to make the start seem fair, he was guilty of his reiteration, ‘Gentlemen.’

Everybody knew that it was a real start this time, and indeed he had made an advance, and had run straight through half a sentence.  It was therefore manifestly unfair, inimical, contemptuous, overbearing, and base, for one of the three young cricketers at this period to fling back weariedly and exclaim:  ‘By the Lord; too many gentlemen here!’

Evan heard him across the table.  Lacking the key of the speaker’s previous conduct, the words might have passed.  As it was, they, to the ale-invaded head of a young hero, feeling himself the world’s equal, and condemned nevertheless to bear through life the insignia of Tailordom, not unnaturally struck with peculiar offence.  There was arrogance, too, in the young man who had interposed.  He was long in the body, and, when he was not refreshing his sight by a careless contemplation of his finger-nails, looked down on his company at table, as one may do who comes from loftier studies.  He had what is popularly known as the nose of our aristocracy:  a nose that much culture of the external graces, and affectation of suavity, are required to soften.  Thereto were joined thin lips and arched brows.  Birth it was possible he could boast, hardly brains.  He sat to the right of the fair-haired youth, who, with his remaining comrade, a quiet smiling fellow, appeared to be better liked by the guests, and had been hailed once or twice, under correction of the chairman, as Mr. Harry.  The three had distinguished one there by a few friendly passages; and this was he who had offered his bed to Evan for the service of the girl.  The recognition they extended to him did not affect him deeply.  He was called Drummond, and had his place near the chairmen, whose humours he seemed to relish.

The ears of Mr. Raikes were less keen at the moment than Evan’s, but his openness to ridicule was that of a man on his legs solus, amid a company sitting, and his sense of the same—­when he saw himself the victim of it —­acute.  His face was rather comic, and, under the shadow of embarrassment, twitching and working for ideas—­might excuse a want of steadiness and absolute gravity in the countenances of others.