The devil possessing him gnawed so furiously that a partial mitigation of the pain was afforded by sight of waving hats on a hill-rise of the road.  He flourished his whip.  The hats continued at wind-mill work.  It signified brisk news to him, and prospect of glee to propitiate any number of devils.

‘You will want a maid to attend on you,’ he said.

She replied:  ’I am not used to attendance on me.  Henrietta’s maid would help.  I did not want her.  I had no maid at home.  I can do for myself.  Father and mother liked me to be very independent.’

He supposed he would have to hear her spelling her words out next.

The hill-top was gained; twenty paces of pretty trotting brought up the coach beside an inn porch, in the style of the finish dear to whips, and even imperative upon them, if they love their art.  Two gentlemen stood in the road, and a young woman at the inn door; a dark-haired girl of an anxious countenance.  Her puckers vanished at some signal from inside the coach.

‘All right, Madge; nothing to fear,’ Fleetwood called to her, and she curtseyed.

He alighted, saying to her, before he spoke to his friends:  ’I’ve brought him safe; had him under my eye the last four and twenty hours.  He’ll do the trick to-day.  You don’t bet?’

‘Oh! my lord, no.’

‘Help the lady down.  Out with you, Ines!’

The light-legged barge-faced man touched ground capering.  He was greeted ‘Kit’ by the pair of gentlemen, who shook hands with him, after he had faintly simulated the challenge to a jig with Madge.  She flounced from him, holding her arms up to the lady.  Landlord, landlady, and hostler besought the lady to stay for the fixing of a ladder.  Carinthia stepped, leaped, and entered the inn, Fleetwood remarking: 

‘We are very independent, Chummy Potts.’

‘Cordy bally, by Jove!’ Potts cried.  But the moment after this disengaged ejaculation, he was taken with a bewilderment.  ‘At the Opera?’ he questioned of his perplexity.

‘No, sir, not at the Opera,’ Fleetwood rejoined.  ’The lady’s last public appearance was at the altar.’

’Sort of a suspicion of having seen her somewhere.  Left her husband behind, has she?’

‘You see:  she has gone in.’

The scoring of a proposition of Euclid on the forehead of Potts amused him and the other gentleman, who was hailed ‘Mallard!’ and cared nothing for problems involving the female of man when such work was to the fore as the pugilistic encounter of the Earl of Fleetwood’s chosen Kit Ines, with Lord Brailstone’s unbeaten and well-backed Ben Todds.