But it was returning.  A nearer view showed it empty of the couple.

Morsfield bade the coachman pull up, and he was readily obeyed.  Answers came briskly.

Although provincial acting is not of the high class which conceals the art, this man’s look beside him and behind him at vacant seats had incontestable evidence in support of his declaration, that the lady and gentleman had gone on by themselves:  the phaeton was a box of flown birds.

‘Where did you say they got out, you dog?’ said Cumnock.

The coachman stood up to spy a point below.  ’Down there at the bottom of the road, to the right, where there’s a stile across the meadows, making a short cut by way of a bridge over the river to Busley and North Tothill, on the high-road to Hocklebourne.  The lady and gentleman thought they ‘d walk for a bit of exercise the remains of the journey.’

‘Can’t prove the rascal’s a liar,’ Cumnock said to Morsfield, who rallied him savagely on his lucky escape from another knock-down blow, and tossed silver on the seat, and said—­

’We ‘ll see if there is a stile.’

‘You’ll see the stile, sir,’ rejoined the man, and winked at their backs.

Both cavaliers, being famished besides baffled, were in sour tempers, expecting to see just the dead wooden stile, and see it as a grin at them.  Cumnock called on Jove to witness that they had been donkeys enough to forget to ask the driver how far round on the road it was to the other end of the cross-cut.

Morsfield, entirely objecting to asinine harness with him, mocked at his invocation and intonation of the name of Jove.

Cumnock was thereupon stung to a keen recollection of the allusion to his knock-down blow, and he retorted that there were some men whose wit was the parrot’s.

Morsfield complimented him over the exhibition of a vastly superior and more serviceable wit, in losing sight of his antagonist after one trial of him.

Cumnock protested that the loss of time was caused by his friend’s dalliance with the Venus in the chariot.

Morsfield’s gall seethed at a flying picture of Mrs. Pagnell, coupled with the retarding reddened handkerchief business, and he recommended Cumnock to pay court to the old woman, as the only chance he would have of acquaintanceship with the mother of Love.

Upon that Cumnock confessed in humility to his not being wealthy.  Morsfield looked a willingness to do the deed he might have to pay for in tenderer places than the pocket, and named the head as a seat of poverty with him.

Cumnock then yawned a town fop’s advice to a hustling street passenger to apologize for his rudeness before it was too late.  Whereat Morsfield, certain that his parasitic thrasyleon apeing coxcomb would avoid extremities, mimicked him execrably.