"Law can't do anything, as you say; opinion must clear the ring of such rascals; a welsher ought not to dare to show his face here; but, at the same time, you oughtn't to have gone unsteadying your muscle, and risking the firmness of your hand at such a minute as this, with pitching that fellow over.

Why couldn't you wait till afterward?
or have let me do it ?" "My dear Seraph," murmured Bertie languidly, "I've gone in to-day for exertion; a little more or less is nothing.

Besides, welshers are slippery dogs, you know." He did not add that it was having seen Ben Davis taking odds with his young brother which had spurred him to such instantaneous action with that disreputable personage; who, beyond doubt, only received a tithe part of his deserts, and merited to be double-thonged off every course in the kingdom.
Rake at that instant darted, panting like a hot retriever, out of the throng.

"Mr.Cecil, sir, will you please come to the weights--the saddling bell's a-going to ring, and--" "Tell them to wait for me; I shall only be twenty minutes dressing," said Cecil quietly, regardless that the time at which the horses should have been at the starting-post was then clanging from the clock within the Grand Stand.

Did you ever go to a gentleman-rider race where the jocks were not at least an hour behind time, and considered themselves, on the whole, very tolerably punctual?
At last, however, he sauntered into the dressing-shed, and was aided by Rake into tops that had at length achieved a spotless triumph, and the scarlet gold-embroidered jacket of his fair friend's art, with white hoops and the "Coeur Vaillant se fait Royaume" on the collar, and the white, gleaming sash to be worn across it, fringed by the same fair hands with silver.
Meanwhile the "welsher," driven off the course by a hooting and indignant crowd, shaking the water from his clothes, with bitter oaths, and livid with a deadly passion at his exile from the harvest-field of his lawless gleanings, went his way, with a savage vow of vengeance against the "d----d dandy," the "Guards' swell," who had shown him up before the world as the scoundrel he was.
The bell was clanging and clashing passionately, as Cecil at last went down to the weights, all his friends of the Household about him, and all standing "crushers" on their champion, for their stringent esprit de corps was involved, and the Guards are never backward in putting their gold down, as all the world knows.