hence he beheld the horsemen with the
grooms at the horses' heads.

"Thank God, I've only been a fool for five minutes!" he summed up his
sensations at the sight. He shut his eyes, praying with all his might
never to meet Mrs. Lovell more. It was impossible for him to combat the
suggestion that she had befooled him; yet his chivalrous faith in
women led him to believe, that as she knew Dahlia's history, she would
certainly do her best for the poor girl, and keep her word to him.
The throbbing of his head stopped all further thought. It had become
violent. He tried to gather his ideas, but the effort was like that of
a light dreamer to catch the sequence of a dream, when blackness follows
close up, devouring all that is said and done. In despair, he thought
with kindness of Mrs. Boulby's brandy.

"Mother," he said, rejoining her, "I've got a notion brandy can't hurt
a man when he's in bed. I'll go to bed, and you shall brew me some; and
you'll let no one come nigh me; and if I talk light-headed, it's blank
paper and scribble, mind that."

The widow promised devoutly to obey all his directions; but he had begun
to talk light-headed before he was undressed. He called on the name of
a Major Waring, of whom Mrs. Boulby had heard him speak tenderly as a
gentleman not ashamed to be his friend; first reproaching him for not
being by, and then by the name of Percy, calling to him endearingly, and
reproaching himself for not having written to him.

"Two to one, and in the dark!" he kept moaning "and I one to twenty,
Percy, all in broad day. Was it fair, I ask?"

Robert's outcries became anything but "blank paper and scribble" to the
widow, when he mentioned Nic Sedgett's name, and said: "Look over his
right temple he's got my mark a second time."

Hanging by his bedside, Mrs. Boulby strung together, bit by bit, the
history of that base midnight attack, which had sent her glorious boy
bleeding to her. Nic Sedgett; she could understand, was the accomplice
of one of the Fairly gentlemen; but of which one, she could not
discover, and consequently set him down as Mr. Algernon Blancove.

By diligent inquiry, she heard that Algernon had been seen in company
with the infamous Nic, and likewise that the countenance of Nicodemus
was reduced to accept the consolation of a poultice, which was
confirmation sufficient. By nightfall Robert was in the doctor's hands,
unconscious of Mrs. Boulby's breach of agreement. His father and his
au