“I know,” he answered, “but I’ve got to. Things have happened. Listen to this. I’ve just left Milly, and she’s in a frightful bate. I shouldn’t have thought a girl could have got in such a rage without hurting herself. Bray told Fowle that there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it--meaning Milly; and Fowle wrote it on a bit of paper and dropped it where Milly was bound to see it. He didn’t put his name, but she knows his writing. Now she’s pretty well mad, and says it’s a disgrace that a thick-necked, speckly, stumpy chap like Bray should be cock of the lower school. Well, I said, very likely it was, but I didn’t see how it could be helped, him being such a fighter. Then she tossed her hair about, and said, ‘I won’t have anything more to do with the lower school at all while he’s cock of it.’ Of course, I didn’t think she included me, being--well, her greatest pal alive since Corkey minor went. So I said, ‘Quite right; I shouldn’t look at them.’ Then she turned round rather suddenly and said _I_ was included. So I said, ‘I should be only too glad to fight him if there was a ghost of a chance, but there isn’t. It’s no good pretending. He’s four inches taller, and miles more round the chest and round the arms, and ages older. In fact, he could lick me with one hand tied behind him.’ Then she said, ‘The days of chivalry are dead,’ which she’d got out of a book, of course; and she added that she was tired of all boys, and that a chap with eyes like mine ought to have more ‘devil’ in him. Yes, she used that word. I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ And she said, ‘Oh, nothing. I wouldn’t have a hair of your head singed for the world; only I thought that it might interest you more than other people to know I’d been insulted. Of course, if it’s nothing to you--’ Then she stopped and marched away, and I went after her and asked her to explain, and she answered that the explanation ought to come from me. She said, ‘D’ you ever read dragon stories?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ Then she went on, ‘Well, in all the ones I’ve read, if a lady asked anybody to kill a dragon, the person didn’t say that the dragon could beat him with one paw tied behind it, even though he thought so; but he jolly well went and did the best he could.’ Naturally, after that I saw what she meant, and I said, ‘Oh, all right, Milly; of course, if you’ve been insulted, I must make the beggar apologize--or try to.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, cheering up like anything; ‘you are my own precious champion, and I love you.’ I tell you all this because you’re my chum, and you’ll have to be my second. And if I can even black his eye before he settles me, it will be something.” “Well, I call it a chouse,” I said. “She might as well have asked you to fight Blanchard or Sims. Look at your arms, not to mention anything else; they’re like cabbage-stalks.”