The assistant secretary, leaning in his chair so as to be a little behind the head of Sir Raffle, did manage to catch the eye of the other Commissioner.  The other Commissioner, barely looking round, smiled a little and then the assistant secretary smiled also.  Eames saw this, and he smiled too.

“Whether any ulterior consequences may still await the breach of the peace of which you have been guilty, I am not yet prepared to say,” continued Sir Raffle.  “You may go now.”

And Johnny returned to his own place, with no increased reverence for the dignity of the chairman.

On the following morning one of his colleagues showed him with great glee the passage in the newspaper which informed the world that he had been so desperately beaten by Crosbie that he was obliged to keep his bed at this present time in consequence of the flogging that he had received.  Then his anger was aroused, and he bounced about the big room of the Income-tax Office, regardless of assistant-secretaries, head-clerks, and all other official grandees whatsoever, denouncing the iniquities of the public press, and declaring his opinion that it would be better to live in Russia than in a country which allowed such audacious falsehoods to be propagated.

“He never touched me, Fisher; I don’t think he ever tried; but, upon my honour, he never touched me.”

“But, Johnny, it was bold in you to make up to Lord de Courcy’s daughter,” said Fisher.

“I never saw one of them in my life.”

“He’s going it altogether among the aristocracy, now,” said another; “I suppose you wouldn’t look at anybody under a viscount?”

“Can I help what that thief of an editor puts into his paper?  Flogged!  Huffle Scuffle told me I was a felon, but that wasn’t half so bad as this fellow;” and Johnny kicked the newspaper across the room.

“Indict him for a libel,” said Fisher.

“Particularly for saying you wanted to marry a countess’s daughter,” said another clerk.

“I never heard such a scandal in my life,” declared a third; “and then to say that the girl wouldn’t look at you.”

But not the less was it felt by all in the office that Johnny Eames was becoming a leading man among them, and that he was one with whom each of them would be pleased to be intimate.  And even among the grandees this affair of the railway station did him no real harm.  It was known that Crosbie had deserved to be thrashed and known that Eames had thrashed him.  It was all very well for Sir Raffle Buffle to talk of police magistrates and misdemeanours, but all the world at the Income-tax Office knew very well that Eames had come out from that affair with his head upright and his right foot foremost.

“Never mind about the newspaper,” a thoughtful old senior clerk said to him.  “As he did get the licking and you didn’t, you can afford to laugh at the newspaper.”

“And you wouldn’t write to the editor?”