The poor youth made no attempt to disguise his flattered emotion.
“Ecod,” he smirked, looking down at his legs, “I’ll not say but I can hold my own among the petticoats. He, he—a word in thine ear, Lionel: Moll, you know—” he whispered into his cousin’s curls, laughing immoderately. “And little Prudence Prue, down at the Red Lion—” Here he whispered again and guffawed: “Odd’s babers, she did! But Di must not hear of it.”
With immovable gravity, the elder man submitted to these boisterous confidences; then, holding his cousin from him at arm’s length, surveyed him with an irony which must have pierced through anything less thick-skinned:—
“What a blade you are! There will be no holding you at Whitehall!”
He suddenly sighed, dropped his hands, shook his head, and assumed a tone of melancholy:—
“Heigho, but we must get thee to Court first! And these adieus will undo all. ’Slife, man, she’s ripe for love. ’Tis rebound, ’tis nature. After the cold fit, the hot one. After old Harcourt, the old husband promptly and happily demised, Harry Rockhurst the stripling, live and young!… After eighty, eighteen.…”
“Nay,” interrupted Edward, sapiently. “Harry Rockhurst is twenty.”
“Aye,” mused Lionel, “and so is our pretty Di. Lord! your worthy mother had scarce called out, ‘Oh,’ of Diana, before my Lady Rockhurst began her, ‘Ah,’ of that young whelp! Well, by this time, these babes will have plighted their troth, if the gods interfere not.” He turned on Hare, his fierce temper escaping him for an unguarded moment: “Why the foul fiend did you let her ride over here to-day?”
Ned swelled with dudgeon.