It was quite the most dastardly desertion on record. There was nothing for it before such an accumulation of testimony but to plead guilty. What can, anybody do with such treachery in the camp? Euphemia admitted grudgingly that she knew Mr. Adolphus, who had long hair and was like our idea of a German Student. He, for his part, was horribly frightened and got away. For, you see, he knew all about the row between Aiken and his wife; and although in the absence of that unearthly sex, the female one, he was ready to lay claim to a deep and subtle knowledge of its ways, he was an arrant coward in the presence of a sample. "I say, Bob," said he aside to his brother Duodecimus, using a convenient, if arbitrary, abbreviation of that name. "What's the fun, Dolly?" said Bob, who was a chap who always made game of everything. "Why, look here! When a customer you know quarrels with his wife, and she does a bunk..." "She _what's_?" "Hooks it, don't you know! Well, when she runs away, and you come across her, and you know all the story about the shindy, being in the beggar's confidence, don't you see?--and she knows you know it, only, mind you, there's nothing exactly to swear by, and you know she knows you know it, and she knows you know she knows--up and down and in and out--intersectitiously, don't you see...?" But the heroic effort to express a situation we have all had a try at and failed over was too much for Mr. Adolphus, and his sentence remained unfinished. Consider that he had supplied an entirely new word, and be lenient! "Want'n'er for yourself, Dolly?" said that frivolous, superficial beast, Bob. "Don't you, that's my advice! She's a head and shoulders taller than you. You'll look such an ass!" Whereupon Mr. Adolphus, not without dignity, checked his brother's ill-timed humour, pointing out that he had done nothing to deserve the imputation of personal motives, and hinting that his well-known monastic bias should have saved him from it. "Very well, then!--let her alone!" said Bob. "But it's very embarrassing, you must admit," said Dolly. "H'm!--don't see why." "The position is a delicate one." "Can't see where the delicacy comes in. You keep out of her way. _She_ won't tackle _you_."