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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.
    She started up in bed. “Good God, what now?” Her maid, who had also been awakened by the sudden commotion, slipped out of the truckle-bed, and ran to peep between the blinds of the window. She was able to report that it was only the Edinburgh mail, and stayed to giggle over the appearance presented by the night-capped passengers descending from it to partake of breakfast in the inn. Miss Taverner, quite uninterested, sank back upon her pillows, but soon found that peace was at an end. The house was awake, and beginning to be in a bustle. In a very short time she was glad to give up all attempt to go to sleep again, and get up.
    Peregrine was knocking on her door before nine o’clock. She must come down to breakfast; he was advised to start in good time for Thistleton Gap if he wanted to procure a good place, and could not be dawdling.
    She went down with him to the coffee-room. There were only a few persons there, the passengers on the Edinburgh mail having been whisked off again on their journey south, and the sporting gentlemen who had made so much uproar the evening before apparently preferring to breakfast in the privacy of their own apartments.
    As she had guessed, Peregrine had been of the company overnight He had made the acquaintance of a set of very good fellows, though he could not recall their names at the moment, and had cracked a bottle with them. The talk had been all of the fight; his talk was still of it. He would back the Champion: Judith must know he had been trained by Captain Barclay of—of—he thought it was Ury, or some such queer name, but he could not be sure. At all events, he was the man who went on walking matches—she might have heard of him. It was said he had reduced Cribb to thirteen stone six pounds. Cribb was in fine fettle; he did not know about the Black, though there was no denying he could give Cribb four years. Cribb must be going on for thirty now. So it went on, while Judith ate her breakfast, and interpolated a yes or a no where it was required.
    Peregrine had no qualms about leaving her to her own devices for the morning: the town would be empty, and she might walk abroad with perfect propriety; need not even take her maid.
    Soon after he had finished his breakfast he was off, with a packet of sandwiches in one pocket and a bottle in the other. He had no difficulty in finding out the way: he had only to follow the stream of traffic a distance