But lackadaisy! as Poet Burns sings, the best-laid schemes both of men and in the mouse department are liable to gang aft--and so it was in the present instance, for Duchess Dickinson intercepted Chunder Bindabun's wink and, with the diabolical intuition of a feminine, divined the presence of a rather suspicious rat. Accordingly, on the diaphanous pretext that Mr Bodgers was looking faintish and callow, she insisted on applying a very large smelling-jar to his nasal organ. Whether the vessel was charged with salts of superhuman potency, or some narcotic drug, I am not to inquire--but the result was that, after a period of prolonged sternutation, Mr Bodgers became impercipient on a bed of geraniums. Thereupon Chunder, perceiving that he had lost his friend in court, magnanimously said: "I cannot fight an antagonist who is unprovided with a seconder, and will wait until Mr Bodgers is recuperated." But the honourable and diabolical duchess nipped this arrangement in the bud. "It would be a pity," said she, "that Mr Bhosh's fiery ardour should be cooled by delay. _I_ am capable to load a firearm, and will act as Lord Jolly's seconder." Our hero took the objection that, as a feminine was not legally qualified to act as seconder in mortal combats, the duel would be rendered null and void, and appealed to his own seconder to confirm this _obiter dictum_. Unluckily the latter was a poor beetlehead who was in excessive fear of offending the Duchess, and gave it as his opinion that sex was no disqualification, and that the Duchess of Dickinson was fully competent to load the lethal weapons, provided that she knew how. Whereupon she, regarding Mr Bhosh with the malignant simper of a fiend, did not only deliberately fill each pistol-barrel with a bullet from her own reticule bag, but also had the additional _diablerie_ to extract a miniature laced _mouchoir_ exquisitely perfumed with cherry-blossoms, and to say, "Please fire across this. I am confident that it will bring you good luck." And Mr Bhosh recognised with emotions that baffle description the very counterpart of the nose-handkerchief which she had flung at him months previously at the aforesaid fashionable Bayswater Ball! Now was our poor miserable hero indeed up the tree of embarrassment--and there I must leave him till the next chapter. CHAPTER VI LORD JOLLY IS SATISFIED Ah, why should two, who once were bosom's friends, Present at one another pistol ends? Till one pops off to dwell in Death's Abode-- All on account of Honour's so-called code! _Thoughts on Duelling, by H. B. J._ Many a more hackneyed duellist than our unfortunate friend Bhosh might well have been frightened from his propriety at the prospect of fighting with genuine bullets across so undersized a nosekerchief as that which the Duchess had furnished for the fray.