Ines had done pretty things from the age of seventeen to his twenty-third year.  Remarkably clever things they were, to be called great in the annals of the Ring.  The point, however, was, that the pockets of his backers had seriously felt his latest fight.  He received a dog’s licking at the hands of Lummy Phelps, his inferior in skill, fighting two to one of the odds; and all because of his fatal addiction to the breaking of his trainer’s imposed fast in liquids on, the night before the battle.  Right through his training, up to that hour, the rascal was devout; the majority’s money rattled all on the snug safe side.  And how did he get at the bottle?  His trainers never could say.  But what made him turn himself into a headlong ass, when he had only to wait a night to sit among friends and worshippers drinking off his tumbler upon tumbler with the honours?  It was past his wits to explain.  Endurance of his privation had snapped in him; or else, which is more likely, this Genius of the Ring was tempted by his genius on the summit of his perfected powers to believe the battle his own, and celebrate it, as became a victor despising the drubbed antagonist.

In any case, he drank, and a minor man gave him the dog’s licking..  ’Went into it puffy, came out of it bunged,’ the chronicle resounding over England ran.  Old England read of an ‘eyeless carcase’ heroically stepping up to time for three rounds of mashing punishment.  If he had won the day after all, the country would have been electrified.  It sympathized on the side of his backers too much to do more than nod a short approval of his fortitude.  To sink with flag flying is next to sinking the enemy.  There was talk of a girl present at the fight, and of how she received the eyeless, almost faceless, carcase of her sweetheart Kit, and carried him away in a little donkey-cart, comfortably cushioned to meet disaster.  This petty incident drew the attention of the Earl of Fleetwood, then beginning to be known as the diamond of uncounted facets, patron of the pick of all departments of manly activity in England.

The devotion of the girl Madge to her sweetheart was really a fine story.  Fleetwood touched on it to Mr. Mallard, speaking of it like the gentleman he could be, while Chumley Potts wagged impatient acquiescence in a romantic episode of the Ring, that kept the talk from the hotter theme.

‘Money’s Bank of England to-day, you think?’ he interposed, and had his answer after Mallard had said: 

’The girl ‘s rather good-looking, too.’

’You may double your bets, Chummy.  I had the fellow to his tea at my dinner-table yesterday evening; locked him in his bedroom, and had him up and out for a morning spin at six.  His trainer, Flipper’s on the field, drove from Esslemont at nine, confident as trumps.’

‘Deuce of a good-looking girl,’ Potts could now afford to say; and he sang out:  ‘Feel fit, lucky dog?’

‘Concert pitch!’ was the declaration of Kit Ives.