"I'm very sorry, Dicker," Lothian said impulsively; "you rather riled me, you know. But I behaved badly. It won't do either of us any good to have a rough and tumble here, but of course" . . . he looked significantly at the door. Ingworth took him, and admired him for his simplicity. The old public school feeling was uppermost now. He knew that Gilbert knew he was no coward. He knew also that he could have knocked the other into a cocked hat in about three minutes. "I was abominably rude, Gilbert," he said frankly. "Don't let's talk rot. I'm sorry." "It's good of you to take it in that way, Dicker. I'm awfully sorry, too." Mr. Helzephron interposed. "All's well that ends well," he remarked sententiously. "That's the best of gentlemen, they do settle these matters as gentlemen should. Now if you'll come with me, sir, I'll take you to the lavatory and you can sponge that blood off your face. You're not marked, really." With a grin and a wink to Lothian, both of which were returned, Ingworth marched away in the wake of the landlord. The air was cleared. Gilbert was deeply sorry for what he had done. He had quite forgotten the provocation that he had received. "Good old sportsman, Dicker!" he thought; "he's a fine chap. I was a bounder to hit him. It would have served me jolly well right if he'd given me a hiding." And the younger man, as he went to remove the stain of combat, had kindly and generous thoughts of his distinguished friend. But, _che sara sara_, these kindly thoughts were but to bloom for an hour and fade. Neither knew that one of them was so soon to be brought to the yawning gates of Hell itself, and, at the very last moment, the unconscious action of the other was to snatch him from them. Already the threads were being woven in those webs of Time, whereof God alone knows the pattern and directs the loom. Neither of them knew. The barmaid, a tall, fresh-faced young girl, came down the room and took the empty glasses from the table. "I say, Mr. Lothian," she remarked, "it's no business of mine, and no offence meant, but you didn't ought to have hit him." "I know," Gilbert answered, "but why do you say so?" "He's got such nice curly hair!" she replied with a provocative look from her bright eyes, and whisked away to the shelter of her counter. Lothian sighed. During the years he had lived in Norfolk he had seen many fresh-faced girls come and go. Only a few days before, he had read a statement made by Mrs. Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army that the number of immoral women in the West End of London who have been barmaids is one quarter of the whole. . . . At that moment, this Miss Molly Palmer was the _belle des coulisses_ of Wordingham. The local bloods quarrelled about her, the elder men gave her gloves on the sly, her pert repartees kept the lounge in a roar from ten to eleven.