His watch was near an hour of the contest, and Brailstone’s man had scored first knock-down blow, a particularly clean floorer.  Thinking of that, he was cheered by hearing Chummy Potts, whose opinions he despised, cry out to Abrane:—­

‘Yeast to him!’ For the face of Todds was visibly swelling to the ripest of plums from Kit’s deliveries.

Down he went.  He had the sturdy legs which are no legs to a clean blow.  Odds were offered against him.

‘Oh! pretty play with your right, Kit!’ exclaimed Mallard, as Kit fetched his man an ugly stroke on the round of the waist behind, and the crowd sent up the name of the great organs affected:  a sickener of a stroke, if dealt soundly.  It meant more than 4 showed.  Kit was now for taking liberties.  Light as ever on his pins, he now and then varied his attentions to the yeasty part, delivering a wakener in unexpected quarters:  masterly as the skilled cook’s carving of a joint with hungry guests for admirers.

‘Eh, Madge?’ the earl said.

She kept her sight fixed, replying:  ‘Yes, I think . . .’  Carinthia joined with her:  ’I must believe it that he will:  but will the other man, poor man, submit?  I entreat him to put away his pride.  It is his—­oh, poor man!’

Ben was having it hot and fast on a torso physiognomy.

The voices of these alien women thrilled the fray and were a Bardic harp to Lord Fleetwood.

He dropped a pleasant word on the heads in the curricle.

Mr. Owain Wythan looked up.  ’Worthy of Theocritus.  It’s the Boxing Twin and the Bembrycian giant.  The style of each.  To the letter!’

‘Kit is assiduously fastening Ben’s blinkers,’ Potts remarked.

He explained to the incomprehensible lady he fancied he had somewhere seen, that the battle might be known as near the finish by the behaviour on board Lord Brailstone’s coach.

‘It’s like Foreign Affaits and the Stock Exchange,’ he said to the more intelligent males.  ’If I want to know exactly how the country stands, I turn to the Money Article in the papers.  That’s a barometrical certainty.  No use inquiring abroad.  Look at old Rufus Abrane.  I see the state of the fight on the old fellow’s mug.  He hasn’t a bet left in him!’

‘Captain Mountain—­Rufus Mus!’ cried Lord Fleetwood, and laughed at the penetrative portrait Woodseer’s epigram sketched; he had a desire for the presence of the singular vagabond.

The Rufus Mus in the Captain Mountain exposed his view of the encounter, by growing stiller, apparently growing smaller, without a squeak, like the entrapped; and profoundly contemplative, after the style of the absolutely detached, who foresee the fatal crash, and are calculating, far ahead of events, the means for meeting their personal losses.