if I could. Our chaps had got their blood up, and
dashed in to finish him with their lances, but I kept them off with
some difficulty, and offered him 'quarter.' I was afraid he wouldn't
understand my language. 'Quarter,' says he, in the richest brogue
you'll hear out of Cork--'quarter! you bloody thieves! will you stick
a countryman, an' a comrade, ye murtherin' villains, like a _boneen_
in a butcher's shop!' He'd have gone on, I dare say, for an hour, but
the men had their lances through him before you could say 'knife.' As
my right-of-threes, himself a Paddy, observed--he was discoorsin'
the devil in less than five minutes. The man was a deserter and a
renegade, so it served him right, but being an Irishman, you see, he
distinguished himself--that's all I mean to infer."

The young officer was exceedingly attentive to an anecdote which, thus
told by its bronzed, war-worn, and soldier-like narrator, possessed
the fascination of romance with the interest of reality.

Lord Bearwarden and his guests had also broken off their conversation
to listen--they returned to the previous subject.

"There are so many people come to town now-a-days," said his lordship,
"that the whole thing spoils itself. Society is broken up into sets,
and even if you belong to the same set, you cannot insure meeting any
particular person at any particular place. Just the same with clubs.
I might hunt you two fellows about all night, from Arthur's to
the Arlington--from the Arlington to White's--from White's to the
Carlton--from the Carlton back to St. James's Street--and never run
into you at all, unless I had the luck to find you drinking gin and
soda at Pratt's." Tom Ryfe, belonging only to the last-named of these
resorts, looked gratified. Dick Stanmore was thinking of something
else.

"Now, to-night," continued Lord Bearwarden, turning to the latter,
"although the ball is in your own step-mother's house, I'll take odds
you don't know three-fourths of the people you'll meet, and yet you've
been as much about London as most of us. Where they come from I can't
think, and they're like the swallows, or the storks, or the woodcocks,
only they're not so welcome. Where they'll go to when the season's
over I neither know nor care."

Tom Ryfe would have given much to feel equally indifferent. Something
like a pang shot through him as he reflected that for him the battle
must be against wind and tide--a fierce struggle, more and more
hopeless, to g