It has been seen that Halstead Rowan, quitting the room in which he had met with so severe a mortification, touched Horace Townsend on the arm and made him a signal to follow, and that the latter obeyed the call. Of course this obedience was a matter of courtesy that could not well be refused, and yet it was accorded with a feeling so painful that it would scarcely have been asked had the torture been foreseen. Rowan, as the lawyer knew, had been insulted before a company of mark and numbers, in so deadly a manner that more than usual forbearance would be necessary to forgive the outrage; and the insulted man belonged, as the lawyer also knew, to a class of Western men not much more prone than those of the South and Southwest, to smother down a wrong under good-feeling or expediency. He had refrained from striking the insulter on the spot; but that forbearance might have been merely the effect of a recollection that ladies were present, and the one lady of all among them; and Horace Townsend no more doubted, during the moment that elapsed while the two young men stepped into the reception-room and secured their hats from the table, that he was being called upon in the sacred name of friendship to act in an affair that would probably cost the life of one or both the antagonists, than he questioned the fact of his own existence. It is doubtful whether he did not believe, before the affair was concluded, that so strange a task had never been set for his friend, by any man incensed to the necessity of mortal combat, since the day when duelling proper had its origin in two naked savages going out behind their huts with knives and a third to look on, for the love of a dusky she-heathen with oblique eyes--down through all the ages, when Sir Grostete set lance in rest and met Sir Maindefer in full career, over a little question of precedence at the table of King Grandpillard; when Champfleury and St. Esprit, beaux of the Regency of Orleans, with keen rapiers sliced up each other like cucumbers, between two bows and a dozen of grimaces, because one did not appreciate the perfume used by the other; until Fighting Joe of Arkansas and Long Alick of St. Louis culminated the whole art of single combat by a little encounter with rifles, followed by a closer embrace with bowies, at one of the Mississippi landings, instigated by the unequal division of the smiles of Belle Logan, of Western Row, Cincinnati. All which means, if the reader has not entirely lost the context, that the course pursued by Halstead Rowan, as a combatant, was eventually found to be something out of the common order. "You saw that, of course--I know that you did!" said rather than inquired Rowan, when they had reached the piazza and were out of hearing of any of the promenading groups.