They had their ramble, agreeable to both, despite the admonitory dose administered to one of them.  They might have been espied at a point or two from across the parkpalings; their laughter would have caught an outside pedestrian’s hearing.  Whatever the case, Owain Wythan, riding down off Croridge, big with news of her brother for the countess, dined at her table, and walking up the lane to the Esslemont Arms on a moonless night, to mount his horse, pitched against an active and, as it was deemed by Gower’s observation of his eyes, a scientific fist.  The design to black them finely was attributable to the dyeing accuracy of the stroke.  A single blow had done it.  Mr. Wythan’s watch and purse were untouched; and a second look at the swollen blind peepers led Gower to surmise that they were, in the calculation of the striker, his own.

He walked next day to the Royal Sovereign inn.  There he came upon the earl driving his phaeton.  Fleetwood jumped down, and Gower told of the mysterious incident, as the chief thing he had to tell, not rendering it so mysterious in his narrative style.  He had the art of indicating darkly.

‘Ines, you mean?’ Fleetwood cried, and he appeared as nauseated and perplexed as he felt.  Why should Ines assault Mr. Wythan?  It happened that the pugilist’s patron had, within the last fifteen minutes, driven past a certain thirty-acre meadow, sight of which on his way to Carinthia had stirred him.  He had even then an idea of his old deeds dogging him to bind him, every one of them, the smallest.

‘But you’ve nothing to go by,’ he said.  ’Why guess at this rascal more than another?’

Gower quoted Mrs. Rundles and the ostler for witnesses to Kit’s visit yesterday to the Royal Sovereign, though Kit shunned the bar of the Esslemont Arms.

’I guess pretty clearly, because I suspect he was hanging about and saw me and Madge together.’

’Consolations for failures in town?—­by the way, you are complimented, and I don’t think you deserved it.  However, there was just the chance to stop a run to perdition.  But, Madge?  Madge?  I’d swear to the girl!’

‘Not so hard as I,’ said Gower, and spoke of the oath to come between the girl and him.

Fleetwood’s dive into the girl’s eyes drew her before him.  He checked a spirt of exclamations.

‘You fancy the brute had a crack for revenge and mistook his man?’

‘That’s what I want her ladyship to know,’ said Gower.

‘How could you let her hear of it?’

‘Nothing can be concealed from her.’

The earl was impressionable to the remark, in his disgust at the incident.  It added a touch of a new kind of power to her image.

‘She’s aware of my coming?’

‘To-day or to-morrow.’

They scaled the phaeton and drove.