ance. 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.

Ines had done pretty things from the age of seventeen to his twenty-third
year. Remarkably clever things they were, to be called great in the
annals of the Ring. The point, however, was, that the pockets of his
backers had seriously felt his latest fight. He received a dog's licking
at the hands of Lummy Phelps, his inferior in skill, fighting two to one
of the odds; and all because of his fatal addiction to the breaking of
his trainer's imposed fast in liquids on, the night before the battle.
Right through his training, up to that hour, the rascal was devout; the
majority's money rattled all on the snug safe side. And how did he get at
the bottle? His trainers never could say. But what made him turn himself
into a headlong ass, when he had only to wait a night to sit among
friends and worshippers drinking off his tumbler upon tumbler with the
honours?