I felt, as you may imagine, the embarrassment and doubt a young man feels when about to protest by a single act against the creed of conduct which he has been taught to follow since he could remember. I smiled, too, as I recalled our first school duel, and how Jack and I ran away. My aunt, seeing there was nothing more to be done, and having said quite enough, retired, I am sure to pray for me, and for herself as the main cause of my coming risk. She would have liked to see me well out of the affair, but I do believe would not have had me excuse myself to my lieutenant, let what might occur. Indeed, she did her best to keep Miss Darthea from betraying what, but for my aunt’s rash outburst, would not have gone beyond those immediately concerned. It was late in the afternoon, when I found Jack writing in his father’s house. I must have looked grave, for he rose quickly and, coming to meet me, set a hand on each of my shoulders--a way he had, but only with me. “What is it?” he said; “not the news?” “No.” In fact, it had clean gone out of my mind. “I have had trouble with Mr. Woodville, and now I must fight him.” And on this I related the whole adventure, Jack listening intently. “Thou shouldst have an older man than I, Hugh. These affairs may often be mended, I learn, without coming to violence.” He seemed a little embarrassed, and reddened, hesitating as he spoke, so that, stupidly not comprehending him as I should have done, I said hastily that the man had insulted my aunt, and that there was but one way out of it, but that I could try to get some one else, if to act as my friend was not to his taste. “At this time,” he writes, “when Hugh came so near to hurting me, I was really going through in my mind what he had already disposed of in his. At Pike’s we heard of nothing but duels. I had long been Pike’s pupil. The duel had come to seem to us, I fear, the natural and inevitable ending of a quarrel. Such was the belief of my good friend Mistress Wynne’s set, and of the officers whose opinions as to social matters we had learned to regard as final. “And yet the absurdity of two Quaker lads so trapped struck me as it did not Hugh. The man must surely have thought him older than he was, but so did most. I feared that I should not do my friend justice; and then I thought of dear Mistress Gainor, whom I now loved, and for whom to lose Hugh would be as death in life; and so, quickly turning it over for one mad moment, I wondered if I could not someway get this quarrel on to my own shoulders. When I answered Hugh I must have made him misunderstand me, or so I think from what he said. When he exclaimed he could get some one else, I made haste to put myself right. We had little time, however, to discuss the matter, for at this moment came a Captain Le Clere with Hugh’s note.