“Gad, yes! her worshippers are legion, and chief among them his Royal Highness, and your cousin, Sir Maurice, who has actually had the temerity to enter the field as the Prince’s avowed rival; no one but ‘Buck’ Vibart could be so madly rash!”

“A most fortunate lady!” said I.

“Mr. Vibart!” exclaimed my companion, cocking his battered hat and regarding me with a smouldering eye, “Mr. Vibart, I object to your tone; the noble Sefton’s virtue is proud and high, and above even the breath of suspicion.”

“And yet my cousin would seem to be no laggard in love, and as to the Prince—­his glance is contamination to a woman.”

“Sir,” returned Mr. Beverley very earnestly, “disabuse your mind of all unworthy suspicions, I beg; your cousin she laughs to scorn, and his Royal Highness she had rebuffed as few women have, hitherto, dared do.”

“It would almost seem,” said I, after a pause, “that, from what I have inadvertently learned, my cousin has some dirty work afoot, though exactly what, I cannot imagine.”

“My dear Mr. Vibart, your excellent cousin is forever up to something or other, and has escaped the well-merited consequences, more than once, owing to his friendship with, and the favor of his friend—­”

“George?” said I.

“Exactly!” said my companion, raising himself on his elbow, and nodding:  “George.”

“Have you ever heard mention of Tom Cragg, the Pugilist?” I inquired, blowing a cloud of smoke into the warm air.

“I won ten thousand guineas when he knocked out Ted Jarraway of Swansea,” yawned my companion; “a good fighter, but a rogue—­like all the rest of ’em, and a creature of your excellent cousin’s.”

“I guessed as much,” I nodded, and forthwith plunged into an account of my meeting with the “craggy one,” the which seemed to amuse Mr. Beverley mightily, more especially when I related Cragg’s mysterious disappearance.

“Oh, gad!” cried Beverley, wiping his eyes on the tattered lapel of his coat, “the resemblance served you luckily there; your cousin gave him the thrashing of his life, and poor Tom evidently thought he was in for another.  That was the last you saw of him, I’ll be bound.”

“No, I met him afterwards beneath the gibbet on River Hill, where, among other incomprehensible things, he gave me to understand that he recognized me despite my disguise, assumed, as he supposed, on account of his having kidnapped some one or other, and ‘laid out’ a certain Sir Jasper Trent in Wych Street according to my orders, or rather, it would seem, my cousin’s orders, the author of which outrage Sir Jasper had evidently found out—­”

“The devil!” exclaimed Mr. Beverley, and sat up with a jerk.

“And furthermore,” I went on, “he informed me that the Prince himself had given him the word to leave London until the affair had blown over.”

Now while I spoke, Mr. Beverley had been regarding me with a very strange expression, his cheeks had gone even paler than before, his eyes seemed to stare through, and beyond me, and his hands were tight-clenched at his sides.