"I won't faint," said Lady Standish setting her teeth.
*****
Lord Verney suddenly awoke to the fact that he had been grievously injured, and that he was in a towering passion. Spluttering, he demanded vengeance of gods and men. Post-chaise, ho, and pistols, forthwith! "My sword!" cried he, feeling for the blade which, however, according to the regulations enforced by the immortal Master of the Bath Ceremonies, was absent from its natural post on his noble hip in this polite assembly.
"Come with me," cried Captain Spicer, clapping his patron on the shoulder in a burst of excitement. "I'll stand to you, of course, lad! You'll want a witness. Gad!" exclaimed the amiable Captain, "we'll have Sir Jasper's liver on the spit before crow of cock!"
SCENE XX
The side-rays of the chaise-lamps played on the widow's soft, saucy face, threw beguiling shadows under her eyes, and fleeting dimples round those lips that seemed perpetually to invite kisses.
Cosily nestling in the corner of the carriage, her head in its black silk hood tilted back against the cushions, in the flickering uncertain gleam, there was something almost babyish in her whole appearance; something babyish, too, in her attitude of perfect confidence and enjoyment.
Denis O'Hara, with one arm extended above her head, his hand resting open on the panel, the other hand still clasping the handle of the door, gazed upon the woman who had placed herself so completely in his power, and felt smitten to the heart of him with a tenderness that was well-nigh pain. Hitherto his glib tongue had never faltered with a woman that his lips were not ready to fill the pause with a suitable caress. But not so to-day.
"What's come to me at all?" said he to himself, as, frightened by the very strength of his own passion, he could find no word at once ardent and respectful enough in which to speak it. And, indeed, "What had come to him?" was what Mistress Kitty was thinking about the same time. "And what may his arm be doing over my head?" she wondered.