Gentlemen below were talking up to the earl.  A Kentish squire of an estate neighbouring Esslemont introduced a Welsh squire he had driven to see the fun, by the name of Mr. Owain Wythan, a neighbour of the earl’s down in Wales.  Refreshments were offered.  Carinthia submissively sipped the sparkling wine, which stings the lips when they are indisposed to it.  The voice of the girl Madge rang on the tightened chords of her breast.  Madge had said she was praying:  and to pray was all that could be done by two women.  Her husband could laugh loudly with Mr. Potts and the other gentlemen and the strangers.  He was quite sure the man he supported would win; he might have means of knowing.  Carinthia clung to his bare words, for the sake of the girl.

A roaring peal went up from the circle of combat.  Kit had it this time.  Attacking Ben’s peepers, he was bent on defending his own, and he caught a bodyblow that sent him hopping back to his pair of seconds, five clear hops to the rear, like a smashed surge-wave off the rock.  He was respectful for the remainder of the round.  But hammering at the system he had formed, in the very next round he dropped from a tremendous repetition of the blow, and lay flat as a turbot.  The bets against him had simultaneously a see-saw rise.

‘Bellows, he appears to have none,’ was the comment of Chumley Potts.

‘Now for training, Chummy!’ said Lord Fleetwood.

‘Chummy!’ signifying a crow over Potts, rang out of the hollows of Captain Abrane on Lord Brailstone’s coach.

Carinthia put a hand behind her to Madge.  It was grasped, in gratitude for sympathy or in feminine politeness.  The girl murmured:  ’I’ve seen worse.’  She was not speaking to ears.

Lord Fleetwood sat watch in hand.  ‘Up,’ he said; and, as if hearing him, Kit rose from the ministering second’s knee.  He walked stiffly, squared after the fashion of a man taught caution.  Ben made play.  They rounded the ring, giving and taking.  Ben rushed, and had an emollient; spouted again and was corked; again, and received a neat red-waxen stopper.  He would not be denied at Kit’s door, found him at home and hugged him.  Kit got himself to grass, after a spell of heavy fibbing, Ben’s game.

It did him no great harm; it might be taken for an enlivener; he was dead on his favourite spot the ensuing round, played postman on it.  So cleverly, easily, dancingly did he perform the double knock and the retreat, that Chumley Potts was moved to forget his wagers and exclaim:  ‘Racket-ball, by Jove!’

‘If he doesn’t let the fellow fib the wind out of him,’ Mallard addressed his own crab eyeballs.

Lord Fleetwood heard and said coolly:  ’Tightstrung.  I kept him fasting since he earned his breakfast.  You don’t wind an empty rascal fit for action.  A sword through the lungs won’t kill when there’s no air in them.’

That was printed in the ‘Few Words before the Encounter’, in the Book Of maxims for men.  Carinthia, hearing everything her husband uttered, burned to remind him of the similarity between his opinions and her father’s.