"What if I refuse?"
"Why then, sir, I shall give myself the trouble to walk beside you until your sense of decency is happily restored. If that should not happen between this and your own door, I must leave you for the night and call upon you to-morrow."
"This is no tone to take among gentlemen."
"It is the tone you oblige me to take."
"Come away, Jack!" Hetty besought him in a whisper: but she knew that he would not.
"Surely," he said, "after so gross an offence you will lose no more time in begging my sister's pardon?"
"Look you now, master parson," growled the offender, "you are thin in the legs, but I am not too drunk to shoot snipe." With his gun he menaced John, who did not flinch.
But here Dick Ellison interposed. "Don't be a fool, Congdon! Put up your gun and say you're sorry, like a gentleman. Damme"—Dick in his cups was notoriously quarrelsome and capricious as to the grounds of quarrel—"she's my sister, too, for that matter. And Jack's my brother: and begad, he has the right of it. He's a pragmatical fellow, but as plucky as ginger, and I love him for it. Fight him, you'll have to fight me—understand? So up and say you're sorry, like a man."
"Oh, if you're going to take that line, I'm willing enough."
Mr. Congdon shuffled out an apology.
"That's right," Dick Ellison announced. "Now shake hands on it, like good fellows. Jack's as good a man as any of us for all his long coat."