The other merely remarked:  ’Oh! that is the language of the son of a gentleman.’

The tumult of irony, abuse, and retort, went on despite the efforts of Drummond and the chairman.  It was odd; for at Farmer Broadmead’s end of the table, friendship had grown maudlin:  two were seen in a drowsy embrace, with crossed pipes; and others were vowing deep amity, and offering to fight the man that might desire it.

‘Are ye a friend? or are ye a foe?’ was heard repeatedly, and consequences to the career of the respondent, on his choice of affirmatives to either of these two interrogations, emphatically detailed.

It was likewise asked, in reference to the row at the gentlemen’s end:  ‘Why doan’ they stand up and have ‘t out?’

‘They talks, they speechifies—­why doan’ they fight for ’t, and then be friendly?’

‘Where’s the yarmony, Mr. Chair, I axes—­so please ye?’ sang out Farmer Broadmead.

‘Ay, ay!  Silence!’ the chairman called.

Mr. Raikes begged permission to pronounce his excuses, but lapsed into a lamentation for the squandering of property bequeathed to him by his respected uncle, and for which—­as far as he was intelligible—­he persisted in calling the three offensive young cricketers opposite to account.

Before he could desist, Harmony, no longer coy, burst on the assembly from three different sources.  ‘A Man who is given to Liquor,’ soared aloft with ‘The Maid of sweet Seventeen,’ who participated in the adventures of ‘Young Molly and the Kicking Cow’; while the guests selected the chorus of the song that first demanded it.

Evan probably thought that Harmony was herself only when she came single, or he was wearied of his fellows, and wished to gaze a moment on the skies whose arms were over and around his young beloved.  He went to the window and threw it up, and feasted his sight on the moon standing on the downs.  He could have wept at the bitter ignominy that severed him from Rose.  And again he gathered his pride as a cloak, and defied the world, and gloried in the sacrifice that degraded him.  The beauty of the night touched him, and mixed these feelings with mournfulness.  He quite forgot the bellow and clatter behind.  The beauty of the night, and heaven knows what treacherous hope in the depths of his soul, coloured existence warmly.

He was roused from his reverie by an altercation unmistakeably fierce.

Raikes had been touched on a tender point.  In reply to a bantering remark of his, Laxley had hummed over bits of his oration, amid the chuckles of his comrades.  Unfortunately at a loss for a biting retort, Raikes was reduced to that plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat.

’I ‘ll tell you what,’ said Laxley, ’I never soil my hands with a blackguard; and a fellow who tries to make fun of Scripture, in my opinion is one.  A blackguard—­do you hear?  But, if you’ll give me satisfactory proofs that you really are what I have some difficulty in believing the son of a gentleman—­I ’ll meet you when and where you please.’