to strike one of them off the number privileged at the moment to intrude on him.  Others would follow; this one must be the first to go.  He wrote the famous letter to Lord Brailstone, which debarred the wily pursuer from any pretext to be running down into Mrs. Levellier’s neighbourhood, and also precluded the chance of his meeting the fair lady at Calesford.  With the brevity equivalent to the flick of a glove on the cheek, Lord Brailstone was given to understand by Lord Fleetwood that relations were at an end between them.  No explanation was added; a single sentence executed the work, and in the third person.  He did not once reflect on the outcry in the ear of London coming from the receiver of such a letter upon payment of a debt.

The letter posted and flying, Lord Fleetwood was kinder to Chumley Potts; he had a friendly word for Gower Woodseer; though both were heathens, after their diverse fashions, neither of them likely ever to set out upon the grand old road of Rome:  Lord Feltre’s ’Appian Way of the Saints and Comforters.’

Chummy was pardoned when they separated at night for his reiterated allusions to the temptation of poor Ambrose Mallard’s conclusive little weapon lying on the library table within reach of a man’s arm-chair:  in its case, and the case locked, yes, but easily opened, ’provoking every damnable sort of mortal curiosity!’ The soundest men among us have their fits of the blues, Fleetwood was told.  ‘Not wholesome!’ Chummy shook his head resolutely, and made himself comprehensibly mysterious.  He meant well.  He begged his old friend to promise he would unload and keep it unloaded.  ’For I know the infernal worry you have—­deuced deal worse than a night’s bad luck!’ said he; and Fleetwood smiled sourly at the world’s total ignorance of causes.  His wretchedness was due now to the fact that the aforetime huntress refused to be captured.  He took a silver cross from a table-drawer and laid it on the pistol-case.  ‘There, Chummy,’ he said; that was all; not sermonizing or proselytizing.  He was partly comprehended by Chumley Potts, fully a week later.  The unsuspecting fellow, soon to be despatched in the suite of Brailstone, bore away an unwontedly affectionate dismissal to his bed, and spoke some rather squeamish words himself, as he recollected with disgust when he ran about over London repeating his executioner’s.

The Cross on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood’s thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners must have their immediate termination.  These old friends were the plague-infected clothes he flung off his body.  But the Cross where it lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his belief in the Eternal would pay.  Henrietta had mentioned her husband’s defeat, by some dastardly contrivance.