"Now, I should say to you," proceeded his urbane neighbour, making the most of a happy stroke of innuent personification, "Look here, Quorn, my dasher, the man, lord or lout, or both, who makes love to my sister, my lovely Lalage, and engages her affections has got to marry her. See?" The uncomfortable personator of himself signified promptly his entire comprehension. "If you jib," continued the Antipodean Chesterfield, "if you kick, if you try to slip out,--well--you've got to settle with the strongest man for his weight in the continent of Australia; a man, mark you, whose trade is fighting, against odds for preference, and who means business. See?" The fascinated Quorn signed his complete grasp of the speaker's meaning. "A man, I repeat," Carnaby went on, after seeking fresh ideas in a further libation, "who sticks at nothing where his honour and the honour of his family are concerned. Law? What's the law to me? Nothing. They know that out there. The law where I came from gives me a wide berth. It knows me. When a slink calls himself a nobleman, he's got to act as a nobleman, or I'll make him act as a swab and scrub the place down with him. See?" He glared round at his three auditors who were listening to his edifying account of himself and his proposals with rapt attention. "I've not seen the man I'm after, unless I see him before me now," Mr. Leo proceeded, waxing truculent. "But I presume he has a nose." This supposition remaining unchallenged, he took up a banana, and proceeded, "There it is." He wrenched off the end of the fruit and tossed it in the air whence it came down plump into Quorn's forgotten glass of wine. Ignoring the episode, the pretty fellow continued, "He has, or as a nobleman, should have, two eyes." No one had a word to say against the computation. "Here goes," said Carnaby, accompanying the words by a graphic illustration (using the remaining portion of the banana for the purpose) of the latest and most approved method of removing the human eye without having recourse to a surgical operation. Then, the experiment having been brought to an eminently impressive conclusion, the performer playfully took aim with the residue at a portrait of Everard, ninth Baron Quorn, and was successful in hitting that nobleman in the middle of his somewhat vacuous face, and rendering the likeness, if any, for the time unrecognizable. Emboldened by the effect produced not only on the face of the family portrait but on those of his living hearers, Mr. Leo became even more ruthlessly virulent. "Lord Quorn!" he cried in thick accents of withering scorn, "If Lord Quorn or any other man, noble or otherwise, plays fast and loose with my glorious sister, I'll just take him and twist his head off his shoulders. Won't I?"