you can take it from me that at your very best it will
take you, or any man in England, all your time to master him. Now, get
back this instant to your work, and never let me find you shirking it
again." With imperious eyes she looked the two strong men down, and
then, turning on her heel, she swept out of the room.

The Champion whistled as the door closed behind her, and mopped his brow
with his red bandanna handkerchief as he looked across at his abashed
companion. "My word, lad," said he, "it's earnest from this day on."

"Yes," said Tom Spring, solemnly, "it's earnest from this day on."

In the course of the next fortnight the lady made several surprise
visits to see that her champion was being properly prepared for the
contest which lay before him. At the most unexpected moments she would
burst into the training quarters, but never again had she to complain of
any slackness upon his part or that of his trainer. With long bouts
of the gloves, with thirty-mile walks, with mile runs at the back of
a mailcart with a bit of blood between the shafts, with interminable
series of jumps with a skipping-rope, he was sweated down until his
trainer was able to proudly proclaim that "the last ounce of tallow is
off him and he is ready to fight for his life." Only once was the
lady accompanied by any one upon these visits of inspection. Upon this
occasion a tall young man was her companion. He was graceful in figure,
aristocratic in his bearing, and would have been strikingly handsome had
it not been for some accident which had shattered his nose and broken
all the symmetry of his features. He stood in silence with moody eyes
and folded arms, looking at the splendid torso of the prize-fighter as,
stripped to the waist, he worked with his dumbbells.

"Don't you think he will do?" said the lady.

The young swell shrugged his shoulders. "I don't like it, _cara mia_. I
can't pretend that I like it."

"You must like it, George. I have set my very heart on it."

"It is not English, you know. Lucrezia Borgia and Mediaeval Italy.
Woman's love and woman's hatred are always the same, but this particular
manifestation of it seems to me out of place in nineteenth-century
London."

"Is not a lesson needed?"

"Yes, yes; but one would think there were other ways."

"You tried another way. What did you get out of that?"

The young man smiled rather grimly, as he turned up his cuff and looked
at a puckered hole in his wrist.

"No