“I won’t say that, but there’s something in the eye of an Irish girl that sets your heart beating nineteen to the dozen----” “Provided it’s an Irish heart.” “Provided it’s nothing of the sort!” cried Massey hotly. “Provided it’s any heart with warm red blood in it, and not brimstone and treacle!” “Gentlemen, a little calmness, please,” suggested Lauriston, who was being hustled off the pavement by the uneven walk and excited gesticulations of the disputants, “or it will come to vivisection in a minute to prove the correctness of your studies in anatomy.” However, the argument still went on, growing every moment more lively, until, both disputants turning to Lauriston as referee at the same time, they found that he had disappeared. The common wrong made them friends again at once. “He’s given us the slip,” said Dicky. “We’ll pay him out for it,” added Massey. They were standing on the pavement of one of those shabby, ill-kept streets which intersect the busier, broader thoroughfares of this part of London. The noisy children, who played in the gutters during the day and turned their skipping-ropes across the flag-stones in the evening, had now gone to bed, and the stream of poor, struggling, obscure London life flowed by intermittently. A quiet, care-worn woman passed quickly, with her basket on her arm, counting up the pence she had left after her evening’s bargaining; a few paces behind her came a couple of public-house loafers--pallid, vacuous, with flabby hats, and the slimy black coats a great deal too long for them, so much affected by this class; and then a line of loud-voiced, shrill-laughing girls, with dirty faces and Gainsborough hats o’ershadowed by a plentiful crop of bedraggled feathers. Not a tempting neighbourhood this by any means, nor one in which two dashing hussars of one or two and twenty could expect to pick up desirable acquaintances, or to take a deep interest in their unknown brethren; and yet the eyes of these two young soldiers had fallen there upon a sight fascinating enough to make them forget the mean flight of their companion, and to ignore the smell of fried fish, the hoarse cry of the costermonger at the corner of the street, even the occasional contact of a greasy elbow.