That duty was very quickly accomplished. The eldest and most responsible of the three friends told Bilbury very gently but very firmly that there could be no issue but one to the scene which had just passed. “I am not blaming you, my dear John,” he said kindly (Mr. Bilbury’s name was John), “but you know there can be only one issue.” Meanwhile Mr. Newman’s friends, after maintaining their strict and haughty parade almost the whole length of the Rue Bonaparte, broke silence together, and said: “It is shameful, and you will not tolerate it!” To which Mr. Newman replied by an assurance that he would in no way fall beneath the dignity of the situation. More than this neither Mr. Bilbury nor Mr. Newman knew, but they both went to bed that night much later than either intended, and each felt in himself a something of what Ruth felt when she stood among the alien corn, or words to that effect. And next morning each of them woke with the knowledge that he had some terrible business on hand with some ass of a foreigner who had got excited, or, to be more accurate, had suddenly stopped being excited for wholly incomprehensible reasons at a particular moment in a lively conversation. Both Mr. Newman and Mr. Bilbury were, I say, in this mood when there entered to Mr. Newman in his room in the Rue des Ecoles (which he could ill afford) two of his friends of the night before, who said to him very simply and rapidly that it would be better for them to act as his seconds as the others had chosen them as most fitted. To this Mr. Newman murmured his adhesion, and was about to ask anxiously whether he would soon see them again, when, with a solemnity quite out of keeping with their usual good-fellowship, they bowed in a ritual manner and disappeared. Meanwhile a similar scene was taking place in the little fourth-floor room which Mr. Bilbury occupied, and Mr. Bilbury, somewhat better acquainted with the customs of the University, dismissed his two friends with a little speech and awaited developments. Before lunch the thing was arranged, and Mr. Newman, who was waiting in a rather hopeless way for his friends’ return, was informed at about twelve o’clock that all was settled; it was to be at the end of the week, up in Meudon, in a field which belonged to one of his friends’ uncles. “We are less likely to be disturbed there,” said the friend, “and we can carry the affair to a satisfactory finish.” Then he added: “It has a high wall all round it.” “But,” said the other second, interrupting him, “since we have chosen pistols that will not be much good, for the report will be heard.” “No,” said the first second in a nonchalant manner, “my uncle keeps a shooting gallery and the neighbours will think it a very ordinary sound. You had,” he explained courteously to Mr. Newman, “the choice of weapons as the insulted party, and we chose pistols of course.” “Of course,” said Mr. Newman, who was not going to give himself away upon details of this kind.