“We are all well aware of it,” replied the stranger amicably. “Only a fool would have attempted to turn his carriage at this precise point. Do you mean to keep me waiting very much longer, Henry?”

“I’ve said I admit the fault,” said Peregrine, colouring hotly, “and I’m sorry for it! But I shall take leave to tell you, sir, that you were driving at a shocking pace!”

He was interrupted somewhat unexpectedly by the tiger, who lifted a face grown suddenly fierce, and said in shrill Cockney accents: “You shut your bone-box, imperence! He’s the very best whip in the country, ah, and I ain’t forgetting Sir John Lade neither! There ain’t none to beat him, and them’s blood-chestnuts we’ve got in hand, and if them wheelers ain’t sprained a tendon apiece it ain’t nowise your fault!”

The gentleman in the curricle laughed. “Very true, Henry, but you will have observed that I am still waiting.”

“Well, lord love yer, guv’nor, ain’t I coming?” protested the tiger, scrambling back on to his perch.

Peregrine, recovering from his astonishment at the tiger’s outburst, said through his teeth: “We shall meet again, sir, I promise you!”

“Do you think so?” said the gentleman in the curricle. “I hope you may be found to be wrong.”

The team seemed to leap forward; in another minute the curricle was gone.

“Insufferable!” Judith said passionately. “Insufferable!”

Chapter II

To one used to the silence of a country night sleep at the George Inn, Grantham, on the eye of a great fight was almost an impossibility. Sounds of loud revelry floated up from the coffee-room to Miss Taverner’s bedchamber until an early hour of the morning; she dozed fitfully, time and again awakened by a burst of laughter below-stairs, voices in the street below her window, or a hurrying footstep outside her door. After two o’clock the noise abated gradually, and she was able at last to fall into a sleep which lasted until three long blasts on a horn rudely interrupted it at twenty-three minutes past seven.