“I do not believe you, sir!” stated Mr. Stalybridge, staring at him out of a pair of protuberant eyes.

“But it will be proved,” said the Duke. He smiled rather mischievously at his host. “I found the bottle, you know. With one of the constables. And it will be shown that the pistol has never been fired. I am so very sorry!”

“Sorry?” said Mr. Stalybridge explosively.

“Yes—but perhaps you will not care for it, after all! Only everyone will laugh so! To be giving up one’s purse because a cork flies out of a bottle—” The Duke broke off, and raised his handkerchief to his lips. “Forgive me!” he apologized. “I am sure it was enough to frighten anyone!”

“Sir!” said Mr. Stalybridge, and stopped.

“And the boy is only fifteen years old!” added the Duke, in a stifled voice.

Mr. Stalybridge spoke without drawing breath for several moments. The Duke heard him with an air of polite interest. Mr. Stalybridge sat down plump in the nearest chair, and puffed, glaring at him. The Duke sighed, and made as if to rise. “You are adamant, then,” he said. “I had best visit the magistrate—Mr. Oare, is it?”

Mr. Stalybridge swelled slightly, and delivered himself of a bitter animadversion on the jobbery that raised to posts of authority those who were demonstrably unfit to hold them. The. Duke perceived with satisfaction that the constable had not misled him: Mr. Stalybridge and Mr. Oare were at loggerheads. Mr. Stalybridge eyed him in a frustrated way, and said: “If I withdraw the charge it will be out of pity for one who is of tender years!”

“Thank you,” said the Duke, holding out his hand. “You are a great deal too good, sir. You must believe that I am excessively sorry that you should have been troubled by this badly-behaved boy. Indeed, he shall come up to beg your pardon and to thank you himself.”

Mr. Stalybridge hesitated, but after looking very hard at the Duke for a moment or two, he took the hand, saying, however: “You go too fast, young man! I said if!”

The Duke smiled at him understandingly. “Of course!”

“And I don’t want to see the young rascal!” said Mr. Stalybridge angrily. “I only hope it may be a lesson to him, and if you are a relative of his I beg you will take better care of him in the future!”

“I shall not let him out of my sight,” promised the Duke. “And now perhaps we had best visit Mr. Oare.”

It seemed for a time that Mr. Stalybridge was going to draw back, but after the Duke had artlessly suggested that nothing should be said of the ginger-beer bottle he consented to go with him, and to withdraw his charge against Tom. By the time this had been accomplished, and all the other formalities necessary for Tom’s release fulfilled, the day was considerably advanced, and the Duke a good deal the poorer. But he bore Tom off in triumph, and that without having recourse to the use of his own title and consequence, a circumstance which pleased him so much that he quite forgave Tom for his outrageous behaviour. To have outwitted a band of kidnappers, wrested a potential felon from the hands of the Law, and dealt successfully with so inimical a gentleman as Mr. Stalybridge, all within twenty-four hours, gave him a much better idea of himself than ever he had had before. There had been times when he had regretted embarking on his odyssey, but although his efforts on Tom’s behalf had been extremely exhausting, and although his money and his stock of clean linen were both running low, he no longer regretted it. He had made an interesting discovery: the retainers who sped to anticipate his every need, and guarded him from all contact with the common world, might be irksome at times, or at times a comfort to him, but he knew now that they were no more necessary to him than his high title: plain Mr. Dash of Nowhere in Particular could fend for himself.

So it was with the hint of a smile in his eyes that he bade Tom, over a sustaining dinner, render an account of himself.

“Well, I had not enough ready on me to pay the shot here,” explained Tom.

“But you knew that I had locked my money in my dressing-table.”

“Of course I did, but a pretty fellow I should be to think of robbing you!” said Tom indignantly.

“A pretty fellow you were to think of robbing Mr. Stalybridge,” said the Duke quizzically.

“Yes, but that was different!” insisted Tom. “Besides I thought it would be an adventure!”

“You had your wish, then. Your scruples, I collect, didn’t extend to my pistol?”

“But, sir!” Tom said very earnestly. “Indeed, I only borrowed that! And I didn’t take any ball, or powder, you know, because I thought you would not like me to.”

“Well, that was very thoughtful of you,” said the Duke. “And it would have been still more thoughtful of you if you had remembered to keep out of scrapes, and to take care of Belinda.”

“I was trying to take care of her, sir!” Tom pointed out. “For when you did not come home last night, the landlord said you had loped off without paying our shot, and he was deuced unpleasant, and I quite thought it would make Belinda uncomfortable, only she is such an unaccountable girl, and heeds nothing, besides being a dead bore—anyway, I thought I must see what could be done to come off all right. And I have played that trick with a bottle before, you know, and I thought very likely it would answer, and so it would have, if only that fellow had not crept up behind me! And, oh, sir, I very nearly hit the coachman! Only fancy! For I can tell you it is not at all an easy thing to aim a ginger-beer cork.”

“Tom, you are a hopeless case, and I have a good mind to take you home to your father!”

“Oh, no, sir, pray do not! I swear I will not do it again! It would be too bad of you, when I took such pains not to give my name at that horrid Roundhouse, nor anything that could make the constable think I was me! For there is no knowing but that Mr. Snape might have enquired for me here. And if you had not gone off without saying anything to me I should not have done it!” He looked at the Duke with suddenly knit brows. “Where did you go to, sir?”

The Duke laughed. “You will never forgive me! I had a more exciting adventure than you: I was kidnapped, and held to ransom, and I only escaped by burning down my prison!”

Tom’s eyes glistened enviously. He instantly demanded to be told the whole. It did not seem to him at all strange that anyone should desire to kidnap such an unimportant person as Mr. Rufford, so the questions he eagerly asked were none of them embarrassing. He expressed his heartfelt chagrin at having had no hand in the Duke’s escape, and promised to guard him in future with all the might of his large fists. It occurred to him that Belinda might also have been kidnapped, and he began to make plans for her deliverance. But the Duke had made some enquiries about Belinda’s new protector, and he was obliged to dash Tom’s hopes. Mr. Clitheroe, according to reliable report, was an elderly gentleman of impeccable morals, who lived with his sister on the outskirts of the town, and busied himself largely with charitable works. In what circumstance he had encountered Belinda the Duke could not guess. She had gone out after she had breakfasted that morning, and had returned quite shortly under Mr. Clitheroe’s escort, to collect her two bandboxes. The landlord had been unwilling to allow these hostages out of his hands, but he seemed to stand in some awe of Mr. Clitheroe. From what the Duke had been able to discover, that stern Quaker had severely rated him for admitting seducers and abductionists into his house, and had cut short all his attempts to explain that Belinda was travelling in the company of her brother and his tutor. “And what’s the use of me telling him she has a brother when he’s bound to ask where the brother may be, and all I can answer him is that he’s clapped up in the Roundhouse?” demanded the landlord, justly aggrieved. “I’m sure I don’t know how you’ve got him out, sir, but if it’s all the same to you I’d as lief you didn’t bring him here! And—”

“It is not all the same to me,” had said the Duke, very gently indeed.

There was much that the landlord had meant to say, the chief item of information being that he would not harbour any of the Duke’s party in his house another night, but the air of hauteur which this rather insignificant young man could upon occasion assume made him uneasy, and he decided to leave it unsaid. He told his indignant wife that he hadn’t dealt with the Quality for twenty-five years without knowing when a high-up gentleman had entered his inn. “He can call himself a tutor if he so chooses,” he said, nodding darkly, “but I never saw a tutor that wore a coat like that of his, nor one that looked at you as though you was two-penn’orth of nothing.” He added philosophically: “Besides, he ain’t staying more than one night.”

So the Duke, who had now formed the intention of boarding the London stage on the following day, was allowed to remain at the Sun for one more night. Tom, delighted by this change of plan, promised very handsomely to behave with the utmost propriety, and at once began to make interest with his protector for visits to Astley’s Amphitheatre, the Royal Exchange, and other such places of interest. He was just confiding to him his burning desire to witness a bout of fisticuffs at the Fives Court, and the Wax Effigies at Madame Tussaud’s, when the door opened, and Belinda tripped into the parlour, carrying her bandboxes, and looking as unruffled as she was beautiful. She smiled blindingly upon the Duke, and said: “Oh, you are come back, sir! I am so very glad to see you again! Oh, Tom, I quite thought you had gone to Newgate!”

“Much you would have cared!” growled Tom, by no means gratified by her sudden appearance.

“Oh, no, but I am so pleased Mr. Rufford is here! It is beyond anything great! How do you do, sir?”

He had risen from his chair, staring at her. “Belinda!” he exclaimed.

She untied the strings of her bonnet and cast it on to a chair. “We have been in such a pickle!” she informed him. “Only fancy! Tom was arrested for a highwayman, sir!”

“Belinda, what became of you?” demanded the Duke.

“Oh, I was never so taken-in!” she informed him mournfully. “For when you went away, sir, and Tom was put in prison, I didn’t know what I should do. And I must tell you that they were all in an uproar here, so that it was excessively uncomfortable. And the landlord was so uncivil to me this morning that there was no bearing it! So I went out after breakfast, to look at the shops—they are the shabbiest in the world, I am sure! I saw a quiz of a hat, and was in whoops! And just as I was looking into a window where there were all manner of trinkets, but none of them in the least pretty, a very kind gentleman came up to me, and made me a bow.”

“Mr. Clitheroe?” interpolated the Duke.

She laughed. “Good gracious, no, sir! I don’t know what his name was, but he was quite a young gentleman, and modish, too, and handsome! And he asked me if I would like to have a ring to put on my finger.”

“And what,” asked the Duke, with deep misgiving, “did you reply to that?”

“I said I should like it above all things,” said Belinda innocently.

“Lord, I think girls are the stupidest things!” said Tom, in disgust. “If he had asked me, I would have told him that I would rather have a pair of stilts, or something jolly like that! Oh, Mr. Rufford, there was a man at the Fair, walking on a pair so high that I daresay he could have looked into all the upper windows in the town! If I had a pair like that, I could have such larks, and frighten all the old ladies in their beds by looking in at them! Will you buy me a pair, sir? I daresay there may be a shop which sells them, and I know I could learn to walk on them in a trice.”

“No, I will not,” answered the Duke, not mincing matters. “Belinda, didn’t I tell you you must not speak to strange men?”

“Not even when they offer to buy me a ring?” she asked.

“Least of all when they offer to buy you a ring!”

“But how shall I ever have a ring, or a silk dress, if I must not speak to any gentlemen?” she asked reasonably.

“If only you will be good, and mind what I tell you,” said the Duke,” perhaps you shall have a silk dress!”

Belinda sighed. “That is what Uncle Swithin said, only he never gave it to me,” she observed.

“Well, never mind that now! What happened when you told this buck that you would like a ring?”

“Oh, it was so sad!” she exclaimed, her eyes filling with tears. “He said we should go into the shop, and he offered his arm, and I am sure I had not so much as noticed Mr. Clitheroe, for why should I?”