and Laurence would do anything.  But then that could not be granted, and Laurence could only shrug his shoulders.  Nor would Laurence admit that his friend had been false.  “The question lies in a nutshell,” said Laurence, with that sweet Connaught brogue which always came to him when he desired to be effective;—­“here it is.  One gentleman tells another that he’s sweet upon a young lady, but that the young lady has refused him, and always will refuse him, for ever and ever.  That’s the truth anyhow.  Is the second gentleman bound by that not to address the young lady?  I say he is not bound.  It’d be a d——­d hard tratement, Captain Colepepper, if a man’s mouth and all the ardent affections of his heart were to be stopped in that manner!  By Jases, I don’t know who’d like to be the friend of any man if that’s to be the way of it.”

Captain Colepepper was not very good at an argument.  “I think they’d better see each other,” said Colepepper, pulling his thick grey moustache.

“If you choose to have it so, so be it.  But I think it the hardest thing in the world;—­I do indeed.”  Then they put their heads together in the most friendly way, and declared that the affair should, if possible, be kept private.

On the Thursday night Lord Chiltern and Captain Colepepper went over by Calais and Lille to Bruges.  Laurence Fitzgibbon, with his friend Dr. O’Shaughnessy, crossed by the direct boat from Dover to Ostend.  Phineas went to Ostend by Dover and Calais, but he took the day route on Friday.  It had all been arranged among them, so that there might be no suspicion as to the job in hand.  Even O’Shaughnessy and Laurence Fitzgibbon had left London by separate trains.  They met on the sands at Blankenberg about nine o’clock on the Saturday morning, having reached that village in different vehicles from Ostend and Bruges, and had met quite unobserved amidst the sand-heaps.  But one shot had been exchanged, and Phineas had been wounded in the right shoulder.  He had proposed to exchange another shot with his left hand, declaring his capability of shooting quite as well with the left as with the right; but to this both Colepepper and Fitzgibbon had objected.  Lord Chiltern had offered to shake hands with his late friend in a true spirit of friendship, if only his late friend would say that he did not intend to prosecute his suit with the young lady.  In all these disputes the young lady’s name was never mentioned.  Phineas indeed had not once named Violet to Fitzgibbon, speaking of her always as the lady in question; and though Laurence correctly surmised the identity of the young lady, he never hinted that he had even guessed her name.  I doubt whether Lord Chiltern had been so wary when alone with Captain Colepepper; but then Lord Chiltern was, when he spoke at all, a very plain-spoken man.  Of course his lordship’s late friend Phineas would give no such pledge, and therefore Lord Chiltern moved off the ground and back to Blankenberg and Bruges, and into Brussels, in still living enmity with our hero.  Laurence and the doctor took Phineas back to Ostend, and though the bullet was then in his shoulder, Phineas made his way through Blankenberg after such a fashion that no one there knew what had occurred.  Not a living soul, except the five concerned, was at that time aware that a duel had been fought among the sand-hills.