Bhosh, "that we may both miss the target!" And he made a secret motion to Mr Bodgers with his superior eyeshutter, intimating that he was to remember to omit the bullets.

But lackadaisy! as Poet Burns sings, the best-laid schemes both of men and in the mouse department are liable to gang aft—and so it was in the present instance, for Duchess Dickinson intercepted Chunder Bindabun's wink and, with the diabolical intuition of a feminine, divined the presence of a rather suspicious rat. Accordingly, on the diaphanous pretext that Mr Bodgers was looking faintish and callow, she insisted on applying a very large smelling-jar to his nasal organ.

Whether the vessel was charged with salts of superhuman potency, or some narcotic drug,[39] I am not to inquire—but the result was that, after a period of prolonged sternutation, Mr Bodgers became impercipient on a bed of geraniums.

[39]

Thereupon Chunder, perceiving that he had lost his friend in court, magnanimously said: "I cannot fight an antagonist who is unprovided with a seconder, and will wait until Mr Bodgers is recuperated." But the honourable and diabolical duchess nipped this arrangement in the bud. "It would be a pity," said she, "that Mr Bhosh's fiery ardour should be cooled by delay. I am capable to load a firearm, and will act as Lord Jolly's seconder."

Our hero took the objection that, as a feminine was not legally qualified to act as seconder in mortal combats, the duel would be rendered null and void, and appealed to his own seconder to confirm this obiter dictum.

Unluckily the latter was a poor beetlehead who was in excessive fear of offending the Duchess, and gave it as his opinion that sex was no disqualification, and that the Duchess[40] of Dickinson was fully competent to load the lethal weapons, provided that she knew how.

[40]

Whereupon she, regarding Mr Bhosh with the malignant simper of a fiend, did not only deliberately fill each pistol-barrel with a bullet from her own reticule bag, but also had the additional diablerie to extract a miniature laced mouchoir exquisitely perfumed with cherry-blossoms, and to say, "Please fire across this. I am confident that it will bring you good luck."

And Mr Bhosh recognised with emotions that baffle description the very counterpart of the nose-handkerchief which she had flung at him months previously at the aforesaid fashionable Bayswater Ball! Now was our poor miserable hero 

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