Fleetwood’s word was extracted, that he would visit the ‘palazzo’ within a couple of hours.

Potts exclaimed:  ’Good.  You promise.  Hang me, if I don’t think it ’s the only certain thing a man can depend upon in this world.’

He left the earl and Gower Woodseer to their lunatic talk.  He still had his ideas about the association of the pair.  ’Hard-headed player of his own game, that Woodseer, spite of his Mumbo-Jumbo-oracle kind of talk.’

Mallard’s turn of luck downward to the deadly drop had come under Potts’ first inspection of the table.  Admiring his friend’s audacity, deploring his rashness, reproving his persistency, Potts allowed his verdict to go by results; for it was clear that Mallard and Fortune were in opposition.  Something like real awe of the tremendous encounter kept him from a plunge or a bet.  Mallard had got the vertigo, he reported the gambler’s launch on dementedness to the earl.  Gower’s less experienced optics perceived it.  The plainly doomed duellist with the insensible Black Goddess offered her all the advantages of the Immortals challenged by flesh.  His effort to smile was a line cut awry in wood; his big eyes were those of a cat for sociability; he looked cursed, and still he wore the smile.  In this condition, the gambler runs to emptiness of everything he has, his money, his heart, his brains, like a coal-truck on the incline of the rails to a collier.

Mallard applied to the earl for a loan of fifty guineas.  He had them and lost them, and he came, not begging, blustering for a second supply; quite in the wrong tone, Potts knew.  Fleetwood said:  ’Back it with pistols, Brosey’; and, as Potts related subsequently, ’Old Brosey had the look of a staked horse.’

Fortune and he having now closed the struggle, perforce of his total disarmament, he regained the wits we forfeit when we engage her.  He said to his friend Chummy:  ’Abrane tomorrow?  Ah, yes, punts a Thames waterman.  Start of—­how many yards?  Sunbury-Walton:  good reach.  Course of two miles:  Braney in good training.  Straight business?  I mayn’t be there.  But you, Chummy, you mind, old Chums, all cases of the kind, safest back the professional.  Unless—­you understand!’

Fleetwood could not persuade Gower to join the party.  The philosopher’s pretext of much occupation masked a bashfully sentimental dislike of the flooding of quiet country places by the city’s hordes.  ’You’re right, right,’ said Fleetwood, in sympathy, resigned to the prospect of despising his associates without a handy helper.  He named Esslemont once, shot up a look at the sky, and glanced it Eastward.

Three coaches were bound for Sunbury from a common starting-point at nine of the morning.  Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and Lord Simon Pitscrew were the whips.  Two hours in advance of them, the earl’s famous purveyors of picnic feasts bowled along to pitch the riverside tent and spread the tables.  Our upper and lower London world reported the earl as out on another of his expeditions:  and, say what we will, we must think kindly of a wealthy nobleman ever to the front to enliven the town’s dusty eyes and increase Old England’s reputation for pre-eminence in the Sports.