"I'll stand by and see fair play, Colonel. I won't have any hand in it, beyond seeing fair play. You ain't a-goin' to be very hard with them poor boys? Though I seen 'em both shoot; the fair one hunts well, as you know, but the old one's a wonder at an ace of spades." "Will you be pleased to send my man with my valise, Captain, into any private room which you can spare me? I must write a few letters before this business comes on. God grant it were well over!" And the Captain led the Colonel into a room of his house where he remained occupied with gloomy preparations for the ensuing meeting. His adversary in the other room also thought fit to make his testamentary dispositions, too, dictated by his own obedient brother and secretary, a grandiloquent letter to his mother, of whom, and by that writing, he took a solemn farewell. She would hardly, he supposed, pursue _the scheme which she had in view_, after the event of that morning, should he fall, as probably would be the case. "My dear, dear George, don't say that!" cried the affrighted secretary. "As probably will be the case," George persisted with great majesty. "You know what a good shot Colonel George is, Harry. I, myself, am pretty fair at a mark, and 'tis probable that one or both of us will drop--I scarcely suppose you will carry out the intentions you have at present in view." This was uttered in a tone of still greater bitterness than George had used even in the previous phrase, and he added in a tone of surprise: "Why, Harry, what have you been writing, and who taught thee to spell?" Harry had written the last words "in view," in _vew_, and a great blot of salt water from his honest, boyish eyes may have obliterated some other bad spelling. "I can't think about the spelling now, Georgy," whimpered George's clerk. "I'm too miserable for that. I begin to think, perhaps, it's all nonsense; perhaps Colonel George never--" "Never meant to take possession of Castlewood; never gave himself airs, and patronised us there; never advised my mother to have me flogged; never intended to marry her; never insulted me, and was insulted before the King's officers; never wrote to his brother to say that we should be the better for his parental authority? The paper is there," cried the young man, slapping his breast-pocket, "and if anything happens to me, Harry Warrington, you will find it on my corpse!" "Write, yourself, Georgie, I _can't_ write," says Harry, digging his fists into his eyes, and smearing over the whole composition, bad spelling and all, with his elbows.