"I tell you, my dear fellow, she's booked; and Mellot knows it as well as I. He saw her that night at Lady A's." "We saw the third act of the comi-tragedy. The fourth is playing out now. We shall see the fifth before the winter." "Non sine sanguine!" said the Major. "Serve the wretched stick right, at least," said Scoutbush. "What right had he to marry such a pretty woman?" "What right had they to marry her up to him?" said Claude. "I don't blame poor January. I suppose none of us, gentlemen, would have refused such a pretty toy, if we could have afforded it as he could." "Whom do you blame then?" asked Elsley. "Fathers and mothers who prate hypocritically about keeping their daughters' minds pure; and then abuse a girl's ignorance, in order to sell her to ruin. Let them keep her mind pure, in heaven's name; but let them consider themselves all the more bound in honour to use on her behalf the experience in which she must not share." "Well," drawled Scoutbush, "I don't complain of her bolting; she's a very sweet creature, and always was: but, as Longreach says,--and a very witty fellow he is, though you laugh at him,--'If she'd kept to us, I shouldn't have minded: but as Guardsmen, we must throw her over. It's an insult to the whole Guards, my dear fellow, after refusing two of us, to marry an attorney, and after all to bolt with a plunger.'" What bolting with a plunger might signify, Elsley knew not: but ere he could ask, the Major rejoined, in an abstracted voice-- "God help us all! And this is the girl I recollect, two years ago, singing there in Cavendish Square, as innocent as a nestling thrush!" "Poor child!" said Mellot, "sold at first--perhaps sold again now. The plunger has bills out, and she has ready money. I know her settlements." "She shan't do it," said the Major quietly: "I'll write to her to-night." Elsley looked at him keenly. "You think, then, sir, that you can, by simply writing, stop this intrigue?" The Major did not answer. He was deep in thought. "I shouldn't wonder if he did," said Scoutbush; "two to one on his baulking the plunger!" "She is at Lord ----'s now, at those silly private theatricals. Is he there?" "No," said Mellot; "he tried hard for an invitation--stooped to work me and Sabina. I believe she told him that she would sooner see him in the Morgue than help him; and he is gone to the moors now, I believe." "There is time then: I will write to her to-night;" and Campbell took up his hat and went home to do it. "Ah," said Scoutbush, taking his cigar meditatively from his mouth, "I wonder how he does it! It's a gift, I always say, a wonderful gift! Before he has been a week in a house, he'll have the confidence of every woman in it,--and 'gad, he does it by saying the rudest things!--and the confidence of all the youngsters the week after." "A somewhat dangerous gift," said Elsley, drily.