'Tis a matter Wilding will
amend to-morrow. He'll fledge him, never fear. He'll wing him on his
flight to heaven."

Of set purpose did Trenchard add this fuel to the blazing fire. It was
no part of his views that this encounter should be avoided. If Richard
Westmacott were allowed to live after what had passed, there were too
many tall fellows might go in peril of their lives.

Richard, meanwhile, had turned to the man on his left--young Vallancey,
a notorious partisan of the Duke of Monmouth's, a hair-brained gentleman
who was his own worst enemy.

"May I count on you, Ned?" he asked.

"Aye--to the death," said Vallancey magniloquently.

"Mr. Vallancey," said Trenchard with a wry twist of his sharp features,
"you grow prophetic."

CHAPTER II. SIR ROWLAND TO THE RESCUE

From Scoresby Hall, near Weston Zoyland, young Westmacott rode home that
Saturday night to his sister's house in Bridgwater, a sobered man and an
anguished. He had committed a folly which was like to cost him his life
to-morrow. Other follies had he committed in his twenty-five years--for
he was not quite the babe that Blake had represented him, although he
certainly looked nothing like his age. But to-night he had contrived to
set the crown to all. He had good cause to blame himself and to curse
the miscalculation that had emboldened him to launch himself upon
a course of insult against this Wilding, whom he hated with all the
currish and resentful hatred of the worthless for the man of parts.

But there was more than hate in the affront that he had offered;
there was calculation--to an even greater extent than we have seen. It
happened that through his own fault young Richard was all but penniless.
The pious, nonconformist soul of Sir Geoffrey Lupton--the wealthy uncle
from whom he had had great expectations--had been so stirred to anger by
Richard's vicious and besotted ways that he had left every guinea that
was his, every perch of land, and every brick of edifice to Richard's
half-sister Ruth. At present things were not so bad for the worthless
boy. Ruth worshipped him. He was a sacred charge to her from their dead
father, who, knowing the stoutness of her soul and the feebleness of
Richard's, had in dying imposed on her the care and guidance of her
graceless brother. But Ruth, in all things strong, was weak with Richard
out of her very fondness for him. To what she had he might help himself,
and thus it was that things were not so ba