He felt, however, that he had committed himself to the actress and her scheme. It would be impossible for him to draw back after agreeing to join her at supper on the Thursday night. But this fact did not prevent his exercising his imagination with a view to find out some new plan for obtaining possession of the letters. Thursday came, however, without seeing him any further advanced in this direction than he had been when he had first gone to the actress, and he began to feel that hopelessness which takes the form of hoping for the intervention of some accident to effect what ingenuity has failed to accomplish-Mrs. Abington had suggested the possibility of such an accident taking place--in fact, she seemed to rely rather upon the possibility of such an occurrence than upon the ingenuity of her own scheme; and Oliver could not but think that she was right in this respect. He had a considerable experience of life and its vicissitudes, and he knew that when destiny was in a jesting mood the most judicious and cunningly devised scheme may be overturned by an accident apparently no less trivial than the raising of a hand, the fluttering of a piece of lace, or the cry of a baby. He had known of a horse's casting a shoe preventing a runaway match and a vast amount of consequent misery, and he had heard of a shower of rain causing a confirmed woman hater to take shelter in a doorway, where he met a young woman who changed--for a time--all his ideas of the sex. As he recalled these and other freaks of fate, he could not but feel that Mrs. Abington was fully justified in her confidence in accident as a factor in all human problems. But he was quite aware that hoping for an accident is only another form of despair. In the course of the day appointed by Mrs. Abington for her supper he met Baretti, and reminded him of the promise he had made to find an Italian fencing master and send him to Brick Court. “What!” cried Baretti. “Have you another affair on your hands in addition to that in which you have already been engaged? Psha! sir. You do not need to be a swordsman in order to flog a bookseller.” “I do not look forward to fighting booksellers,” said Goldsmith. “They have stepped between me and starvation more than once.” “Would any one of them have taken that step unless he was pretty certain to make money by his philanthropy?” asked Baretti in his usual cynical way. “I cannot say,” replied Goldsmith. “I don't think that I can lay claim to the mortifying reflection that I have enriched any bookseller. At any rate, I do not mean ever to beat another.” “'Tis, then, a critic whom you mean to attack? If you have made up your mind to kill a critic, I shall make it a point to find you the best swordsman in Europe,” said Baretti. “Do so, my friend,” said Goldsmith; “and when I succeed in killing a critic, you shall have the first and second fingers of his right hand as a memento.”