"Oh, he'll turn up all right. He knows jolly well how to take care of himself." But as the night became morning, and the frantic howling of patriotism gone mad rent the otherwise still hours, Raynier did not turn up. Then the revellers and quondam combatants became uneasy--such of them, that is, as were still capable of reflection in any form. CHAPTER TWO. THE DAY AFTER. Raynier awoke in his club chambers the next morning, feeling, as he put it to himself, exceedingly cheap. When we say awoke, rather are we expressing a recurring process which had continued throughout the few remaining night hours since, by force of circumstances and the swaying of the crowd, he had become separated from his companions, and had wisely found his way straight to bed instead of to the Peculiar Club. On this at any rate he congratulated himself; and yet hardly any sleep had come his way. The howling of patriotic roysterers had continued until morning light, and, moreover, his head was buzzing--not by reason of last night's revelry, for in such he never got out of hand, but an ugly lump on one side of his forehead, and a swelled eye, reminded him that it is hard to rescue a maltreated stranger from the brutality of a London mob, and emerge unscathed oneself. "Well, I do look a beauty," he soliloquised as he stood before his glass, surveying the damage. "I shall have a bump the size and colour of a croquet ball for the next fortnight, and an eye to match. How a man of my age and temperament could have cut in with those young asses last night, I can't think. Might have known what the upshot would be. And now I've got to go down to Worthingham to-day. Wonder what nice remark Cynthia will have to make. Perhaps she'll give me the chuck. The fact of my being mixed up in a street row may prove too much for her exceeding sense of propriety." And a faintly satirical droop curled down the corners of the thinker's mouth. Having fomented his bruises, and tubbed, and otherwise completed his toilet Raynier went down to breakfast, soon feeling immeasurably the better for the process. But in the middle a thought struck him; struck him indeed with some consternation. The malacca cane--the instrument with which he had almost certainly saved the life of the assailed Oriental, and which he had put into the hands of the latter as a weapon. It was gone, and--it was a gift from his _fiancee_.