sort of
wooer a parent of strict notions would be likely to encourage. Do you
happen to have come across a goggle-eyed, potty little Alderman
Brooker?--a Town Guardsman who runs a general store in the Market
Place--that's his place of business with the boarding up, and the end
butted in by a Creusot shell that didn't burst, luckily for Brooker. Well,
this beast buttonholed me months ago, and began to spin a cuffer about
Saxham."

"What had the dirty little bounder got to say?" asked Beauvayse,
stiffening in disgust, "about a man he isn't fit to black the boots of?"

"Nothing special nice. Said Saxham had lost his London connection through
getting involved in a mess with a woman," says the big Dragoon.

"Don't we all get into messes of that kind? What more?" demands Beauvayse.

"Said the Doctor had kicked over the traces pretty badly here. Pitched me
a tale of his--Brooker's--having often acted as the Mayor's Deputy on the
Police Court Bench, Brooker being an Alderman, and swore that he'd had
Saxham up before him a dozen times at least in the last three years, along
with the Drunks and Disorderlies."

"It sounds like a hanged lie!"

"If I didn't say as much to Brooker," responds Captain Bingo, "I shut him
up like a box by referrin' politely to glass houses, knowin' Brooker had
been squiffy himself one night on guard, and by remindin' him that men who
talk scandal of their superior officers under circumstances like the
present are liable to be Court-Martialled and given beans. And as the
Chief, and Saxham with him, dropped on Brooker in the act of smuggling
lush into the trenches the other day, I fancy Brooker's teeth are fairly
drawn. Though he swore to me that there isn't a saloon-keeper or a
saloon-loafer in the town that doesn't know Saxham by the nickname of the
Dop Doctor."

"The man don't exist who objects to hear of the disqualifications, mental
and physical, of a fellow who he's thought likely to enter the lists with
him in the--in the dispute for a woman's favour," says Beauvayse, with a
pleasant air of candour. "And though the story sounds like a lie, as I've
said, there's a possibility of its being the other thing. I'm sorry for
Saxham--that goes without sayin'--though I don't like his overbearin'
scientific side and his sledge-hammer manner. But that a man with a record
of that kind should set his heart upon a girl like Lynette Mildare is
horrible, intolerable, Wrynche; and while, for the man's own sak