"Thank you for your agonies. But the virgin in distress found her knight-errant duly provided. He rose out of the mud romantically apropos. To be sure, I think he was mad. But that is all in the part. The complete hero. Geoffrey, could you be a little mad?"
"More than a little," said he with proper ardour. "Pray don't torture us,
Alison. Let us hear."
"It's on my mind that I am going to hear news of my funny friend," said
Hadley solemnly. "Don't you think so, Mr. Boyce?"
Harry, who had been eating with the humble zeal appropriate to a poor scholar, looked up for a moment: "Why, sir, I can't tell at all. If you say so, indeed—" and he went on eating.
"Come, are you in it too, Mr. Hadley?" Alison cried.
"In it, odds life, I am bewilderingly out of it," quoth Hadley, and again told his tale of the mysterious man found tied up in the mud who knew nothing of his assailants and wanted no vengeance on them.
"That's our Benjamin," Alison laughed. "Oh, but you did not let him go?"
"Not let him go, quotha! For what I know, he was a poor, suffering martyr, though to look at his nose, I doubt it. And yet he was fool enough. Nay, how could I stay him?"
"Why, send him to gaol for a rogue and a vagabond. Should he not?" she invited the suffrages of the table.
"Dear Alison, to be sure, yes," Lady Waverton murmured. "These fellows must be put down."