“I say a drink,” said Tony. They had passed out of the market-place and were turning up the corner of the crooked street to their right. A little inn, the “Red Guard,” still showed light in its windows. The door flung open and two men came out, and, with them, the noise of other voices. Late though the hour was, trade was still being driven; it was the night of the year and all rules might be broken with impunity. Maradick and Tony entered. The doorway was low and the passage through which they passed thick with smoke and heavy with the smell of beer. The floor was rough and uneven, and the hissing gas, mistily hanging in obscure distance, was utterly insufficient. They groped their way, and at last, guided by voices, found the door of the taproom. This was very full indeed, and the air might have been cut with a knife. Somewhere in the smoky haze there was a song that gained, now and again, at chorus point, a ready assistance from the room at large. Tony was delighted. “Why, it’s Shelley’s Inn!” he cried. “Oh! you know! where he had the bacon,” and he quoted: “‘. . . A Windsor chair, at a small round beechen table in a little dark room with a well-sanded floor.’ It’s just as though I’d been here before. What ripping chaps!” There was a small table in a corner by the door, and they sat down and called for beer. The smoke was so thick that it was almost as though they had the room to themselves. Heads and boots and long sinewy arms appeared through the clouds and vanished again. Every now and again the opening of the door would send the smoke in whirling eddies down the room and the horizon would clear; then, in a moment, there was mist again. “‘What would Miss Warne say?’” quoted Tony. “You know, it’s what Elizabeth Westbrook was always saying, the sister of Harriet; but poets bore you, don’t they? Only it’s a Shelley night somehow. He would have danced like anything. Isn’t this beer splendid? We must come here again.” But Maradick was ill at ease. His great overwhelming desire was to get back, speedily, secretly, securely. He hated this smelly, smoky tavern. He had never been to such a place in his life, and he didn’t know why he had ever suffered Tony to lead him there. He was rather annoyed with Tony, to tell the truth. His perpetual enthusiasm was a trifle wearisome and he had advanced in his acquaintanceship with a rapidity that Maradick’s caution somewhat resented. And then there was a lack of scale that was a little humiliating. Maradick had started that evening with the air of one who confers a favour; now he felt that he was flung, in Tony’s brain, into the same basket with the old fisherman, the landlord of the “Red Guard,” and the other jovial fellows in the room. They were all “delightful,” “charming,” “the best company”; there was, he felt resentfully, no discrimination. The whole evening had been, perhaps, a mistake, and for the future he would be more careful.