“Vetturino travelling is not like extra-post, my Lord,” said Spicer, fawningly. “You could cover your hundred miles between breakfast and a late dinner, while we thought ourselves wonderful to get over forty from sunrise to midnight.” “That's true,” yawned out Beecher; “vetturino work must be detestable.” “No man could give you a better catalogue of its grievances than your father-in-law, my Lord; he has had a long experience of them. I remember, one winter, we started from Brussels in the deep snow,--there was Baring, Hope, Fisk, Grog, and myself.” “I don't care to hear your adventures; and it would be just as agreeable to me were you to call my relative Captain Davis, as to speak of him by a vulgar nickname.” “Faith, my Lord, I did n't mean it. It slipped out quite unconsciously, Just as it did awhile ago,--far more awkwardly, by the bye,--when I was talking to Lady Lacking-ton. The dowager, I mean.” “And what occasion, sir, had you to refer to Captain Davis in _her_ company?” asked Beecher, fiercely. “She asked me plumply, my Lord, what was her Ladyship's name, what family she came of, who her connections were, and I told her that I never heard of any of them, except her father, popularly known as Grog Davis,--a man that every one on the turf was acquainted with.” “You are a malicious scoundrel, Spicer,” said Beecher, whose pale cheek now shook and trembled with passion. “Well, I don't think so, my Lord,” said the other, quietly. “It is not, certainly, the character the world gives me. And as to what passed between her Ladyship and myself this afternoon, I did my very best to escape difficulties. I told her that the Brighton affair was almost forgotten now,--it was fully eighteen years since it happened; that as to Charles Herbert's death, there were two stories,--some averring that poor Charley had actually struck Grog; and then, though the York trial was a public scandal--Well, my Lord, don't look so angrily at me; it was by no fault of _mine_ these transactions became notorious.” “And what have you been all your whole life to this Davis but his cad and errand-boy,--a fellow he has sent with a bad horse,--for he would not have trusted you with a good one,--to run for a hack stakes in an obscure county, a lounger about stables and the steps of club-houses, picking up scraps of news from the jocks and selling them to the gentlemen? Does it become you to turn out Kit Davis and run full cry after him?” It was but rarely that Beecher's indignation could warm up to the temperature of downright passion; but when it did so, it gave the man a sort of power that few would have recognized in his weak and yielding nature; at all events, Spicer was not the man to stem such a torrent, and so he stared at him with mingled terror and anger.