"May I ask who you are?" Denis Malster demanded, leaning forward in the darkness. "Certainly," replied Lord Henry suavely. "I am Lord Henry Highbarn. I have come here this evening for a rest and a change." A stillness as of death fell on the party, and the excited breathing of all present could be heard. "I thought I knew you," Denis exclaimed at last, recovering from the unpleasant shock the announcement had given him. "But I couldn't for the life of me think who you could be." "Do they know you are here?" Leonetta gasped. "I presume so," said Lord Henry, "my luggage was taken up about an hour ago." He rose, and immediately the rest of the party did likewise. Out on the bank of the Sprigg, in the moonlight, Denis then proceeded to introduce all those present, and the whole gathering slowly crossed the bridge and moved towards the house. Lord Henry, with Denis on his left and Leonetta on his right, was in the van, but the others clustered round as closely as they could, and conversation was general. Women of whatever station in life and from whatever clime, have a very acute sense of strength and power in the opposite sex. If modern society has dispensed with the arena and with the tilting jousts of chivalry, it has nevertheless not deadened either women's passion for the tournament, or the keenness with which they divine the merits of their respective knights. And if argument is the only remaining form in which that clash of arms of olden times is witnessed by them to-day, it is with no diminished interest or perspicuity that they register its results. Ordinary games hardly meet all the demands of the true joust; for, in the first place, they do not include to the same extent as argument, that formidable element in modern knightly equipment, the intellect; and, secondly, because to the most thick-skinned there is something so much more mortifying, ignominious, and humiliating in being beaten in argument than in losing a game, that argument still retains, though in an attenuated and spiritualised form, something of the excitement and gravity of armed conflict. Denis Malster was well aware of all this,--indeed had he not thrown down his gauntlet every night to the Incandescent Gerald precisely because he knew how well he himself looked in the lists, and how well he tilted? But perhaps Lord Henry was even better aware than Denis of the important part played by intellectual male conflict in the presence of women; and he moreover realised more certainly than Denis could possibly have guessed, the precise effect on the female mind of repeated victories in this modern and polite form of tournament.