"Enough to hang you both." Mallow threw Drabble on one side, ran past Mrs. Arne, and dashed his gloved fist through the window. "Help! help! Police! police!" "Kill him! Kill him!" shrieked Madame, fiercely. "Spy!" roared Drabble. The two men swung and reeled across the floor. Neither uttered a word. With clenched teeth and muscles tense they battled fiercely in the small space. Madame rushed to the door and flung it open. "A spy! a spy! Danger! Up! up! up!" she cried down the well of the staircase. Immediately there was a noise of rushing feet--a babel of fierce voices. Mallow heard rather than saw the room filling. He had a firm grip on Drabble's throat, and the man was staggering and gurgling for want of breath. Then a hundred hands--as it seemed--plucked him back. He was hurled to the ground, and beaten and trampled into insensibility. CHAPTER IX. "MAN PROPOSES." "May I ask, Lord Aldean, if you have ever perused the biography of the celebrated Dr. Johnson of Auchinleck?" "Yes, Mrs. Purcell, I have. Mallow made me read it when I was cramming for the 'varsity." "Made you read it!" echoed Mrs. Purcell, majestically; "the word 'made' is misapplied, surely!" "Well, it is a teaser, isn't it?" said Aldean, frankly; "shouldn't read it to keep myself awake. Boswell's a bit long-winded, ain't he?" "Boswell, Lord Aldean, whatever he may be, is not frivolous." "I don't read anything, as a rule," confessed Jim, "except the papers." Mrs. Purcell frowned. "The general slovenliness of style of the daily journals is not such as Dr. Johnson would have approved," said she, in her deep voice. "The very letters of the illustrious lexicographer have the roll and volume of ethic poetry." "'Paradise Lost,'" said Miss Ostergaard; "everybody talks about it and no one reads it." "I have read it, Tui," observed Miss Slarge, rousing herself from her brown study; "it afforded me useful hints on idolatry. Moloch, who is mentioned therein, is identical with the Baal or Bel of the Babylonians. The Romish festival of St. John, at the midsummer solstice, is simply the relic of the Chaldean worship of Tammuz. One of Bel's names was Oannes: the Latinized form of John in the sacred language of the Papists, Joannes. Remove the 'J,' and you can see how the idol was converted into the prophet." "Most interesting," said Aldean, groaning, as this deluge of hard names rattled about his head. "Do you write like Dr. Johnson, Miss Slarge?" "Alas! Rubina does not," sighed Mrs. Purcell. "Rather does she adopt the antithetic style of Macaulay, the historian."