a man to understand.  My beasts, and the wild flowers, hedge-banks, and stars.  Fredi’s poetess will tell you.  Quiet waters reflecting.  I should feel it in Paris as well, though they have nightingales in their Bois.  It’s the rustic I want to bathe me; and I had the feeling at school, biting at Horace.  Well, this is my Sabine Farm, rather on a larger scale, for the sake of friends.  Come, and pure air, water from the springs, walks and rides in lanes, high sand-lanes; Nataly loves them; Fredi worships the old roots of trees:  she calls them the faces of those weedy sandy lanes.  And the two dear souls on their own estate, Fenellan!  And their poultry, cows, cream.  And a certain influence one has in the country socially.  I make my stand on a home—­not empty punctilio.’

Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, ‘Punctilio,’ and not emphatically.

‘Don’t bawl the word,’ said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it rang and sang.  ‘Here in the City the woman’s harmless; and here,’ he struck his breast.  ’But she can shoot and hit another through me.  Ah, the witch!—­poor wretch! poor soul!  Only, she’s malignant.  I could swear!  But Colney ’s right for once in something he says about oaths—­“dropping empty buckets,” or something.’

’"Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as heavily as the ready devil himself,"’ Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase.  ’Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he’s what the critics call sententious.  We’ve all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us.’

‘Come, Fenellan, I don’t think . . .’

‘Oh, yes, but it’s true of me too.’

‘You reserve it for your enemies.’

’I ’d like to distract it a bit from the biggest of ’em.’  He pointed finger at the region of the heart.

‘Here we have Skepsey,’ said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach of a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed javelin’s cast, shot from the doorway to the table.

CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND BOTTLE

This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism.  His lean slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest of prominent large eyes.  He placed his master’s letters legibly on the table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.

Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.

‘How about the Schools for Boxing?’ that gentleman said.