"Apology!" stormed the other. "Apology! what do you mean, sir? This is insolence. Don't attempt to bully _me_, sir! Again I say, at your peril, let me pass!" "Do you refuse it?" asked John Garnet, in a low voice, setting his lips tighter while he spoke. "I do!" was the angry reply. "And what then?" "Nothing unusual," said the other, while he moved out of the way. "Drawer! Please to show us an empty room." A frightened waiter, with a face as white as his napkin, opened the door of an adjoining chamber, set a candle on the chimney-piece, and motioned the gentlemen in. Garnet bowed profoundly, making way for his senior to pass. The other looked about him in uncertainty, and felt his heart sink, while he heard the voices of their departing companions, already in the street. He had little inclination to his task. For one moment the burly, square-shouldered man wished himself safe at home; the next, that intermittent courage which comes to most of us, in proportion as it is wanted, braced his nerves for the inevitable encounter and its result. He grasped his rapier, ready to draw at a moment's notice, while the other coolly locked the door. The waiter, fresh on the town, and unused to such brawls, ran down to summon his master, who was busy over the house accounts in a small parlour below. Till the landlord had added up one column and carried its balance to the next, he paid no attention, though his astonished servant stood pale and trembling before him, with a corkscrew in his mouth and a bottle under his arm. Then both rushed upstairs in a prodigious hurry, just too late to prevent mischief. While yet in the passage they could hear a scuffle of feet, a clink of steel, a smothered oath, and a groan; but as they reached the door it was opened from inside, and John Garnet stood before them, panting, excited, his waistcoat torn, his dress awry, with the candle in his hand. "There is a gentleman badly hurt in that room," said he. "Better send for a surgeon at once, and get a coach to take him home." Then he blew out the candle, slipped downstairs in the dark, and so into the street. The gentleman was indeed so badly hurt that all the energies of the household were concentrated on the sufferer. Nobody had a thought to spare for the assailant till long after pursuit would have been too late. Mr. Gale was wounded in the fore-arm, and had received a sword-thrust through the lungs. With the landlord's assistance he made shift to walk into a bedchamber, where they undressed and laid him carefully down; but before a surgeon could arrive there was obviously no hope, and he only lived long enough to assure the doctor, in the presence of two witnesses, that the quarrel had been of his own making, and was fought out according to the usual rules of fair-play.