He positively declined to persue.  Lord Levellier would not attempt to follow her up without him, as it would have cost money, and he wanted all that he could spare for his telescopes and experiments.  Who, then, was the gentleman who stopped the chariot, with his three mounted attendants, on the road to the sea, on the heath by the great Punch-Bowl?

That has been the question for now longer than half a century, in fact approaching seventy mortal years.  No one has ever been able to say for certain.

It occurred at six o’clock on the summer morning.  Countess Fanny must have known him,—­and not once did she open her mouth to breathe his name.  Yet she had no objection to talk of the adventure and how Simon Fettle, Captain Kirby’s old ship’s steward in South America, seeing horsemen stationed on the ascent of the high road bordering the Bowl, which is miles round and deep, made the postillion cease jogging, and sang out to his master for orders, and Kirby sang back to him to look to his priming, and then the postillion was bidden proceed, and he did not like it, but he had to deal with pistols behind, where men feel weak, and he went bobbing on the saddle in dejection, as if upon his very heart he jogged; and soon the fray commenced.  There was very little parleying between determined men.

Simon Fettle was a plain kindly creature without a thought of malice, who kept his master’s accounts.  He fired the first shot at the foremost man, as he related in after days, ‘to reduce the odds.’  Kirby said to Countess Fanny, just to comfort her, never so much as imagining she would be afraid, ‘The worst will be a bloody shirt for Simon to mangle,’ for they had been arranging to live cheaply in a cottage on the Continent, and Simon Fettle to do the washing.  She could not help laughing outright.  But when the Old Buccaneer was down striding in the battle, she took a pistol and descended likewise; and she used it, too, and loaded again.

She had not to use it a second time.  Kirby pulled the gentleman off his horse, wounded in the thigh, and while dragging him to Countess Fanny to crave her pardon, a shot intended for Kirby hit the poor gentleman in the breast, and Kirby stretched him at his length, and Simon and he disarmed the servant who had fired.  One was insensible, one flying, and those two on the ground.  All in broad daylight; but so lonely is that spot, nothing might have been heard of it, if at the end of the week the postillion who had been bribed and threatened with terrible threats to keep his tongue from wagging, had not begun to talk.  So the scene of the encounter was examined, and on one spot, carefully earthed over, blood-marks were discovered in the green sand.  People in the huts on the hill-top, a quarter of a mile distant, spoke of having heard sounds of firing while they were at breakfast, and a little boy named Tommy Wedger said he saw a dead body go by in an open coach that morning; all bloody and mournful.  He had to appear before the magistrates, crying terribly, but did not know the nature of an oath, and was dismissed.  Time came when the boy learned to swear, and he did, and that he had seen a beautiful lady firing and killing men like pigeons and partridges; but that was after Charles Dump, the postillion, had been telling the story.