Carinthia rose anxiously.  The girl dropped at her feet.  ’You have been so good to me to-day, my lady! so good to me to-day!  I can’t help it—­I don’t often just for this moment; I’ve been excited.  Oh, he’s well, he will do; he’s nothing.  You say “poor child!” But I’m not; it’s only. excitement.  I do long to serve you the best I can.’

She stood up in obedience and had the arms of her young mistress pressing her.  Tears also were streaming from Carinthia’s eyes.  Heartily she thanked the girl for the excuse to cry.

They were two women.  On the road to Canleys, the coach conveying men spouted with the lusty anecdote, relieved of the interdict of a tyrannical sex.

CHAPTER XVIII

DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY

Contention begets contention in a land of the pirate races.  Gigs were at high rival speed along the road from the battle-field to London.  They were the electrical wires of the time for an expectant population bursting to have report of so thundering an event as the encounter of two champion light weights, nursed and backed by a pair of gallant young noblemen, pick of the whole row of coronets above.  London panted gaping and the gigs flew with the meat to fill it.

Chumley Potts offered Ambrose Mallard fair odds that the neat little trap of the chief sporting journal, which had a reputation to maintain, would be over one or other of the bridges crossing the Thames first.  Mallard had been struck by the neat little trap of an impudent new and lower-priced journal, which had a reputation to gain.  He took the proffered odds, on the cry as of a cracker splitting.  Enormous difficulties in regard to the testimony and the verifications were discussed; they were overcome.  Potts was ready for any amount of trouble; Mallard the same.  There was clearly a race.  There would consequently be a record.  Visits to the offices of those papers, perhaps half a day at the south end of London or on Westminster bridge, examining witnesses, corner shopmen, watermen, and the like, would or should satisfactorily establish the disputed point.

Fleetwood had his fun; insomuch that he laughed himself into a sentiment of humaneness toward the couple of donkeys and forgot his contempt of them.  Their gamblings and their bets increased his number of dependents; and imbeciles were preferable to dolts or the dry gilt figures of the circle he had to move in.  Matter for some astonishment had been furnished to the latter this day; and would cause an icy Signor stare and rather an angry Signora flutter.  A characteristic of that upper circle, as he knew it, is, that the good are dull, the vicious very bad.  They had nothing to please him but manners.  Elsewhere this land is a land of no manners.  Take it and make the most of it, then, for its quality of brute honesty:  which is found to flourish best in the British prize-ring.