"I'm as quiet as a lamb," said he; "sure a baby might put its head in my jaws—the devil's gone out of me, Kitty."
"I'm glad to hear it, sir," said she, unappeased. She sat, swelling with ruffled plumes, looking out of the window and biting her lips.
"A moon, too," she thought, and the tears almost started to her eyes, for the vexation of the wasted opportunity and the complete failure of a scene so excellently staged. "How wise, oh, how wise I was, to have secured my exit at Devizes!"
"I frightened her," thought O'Hara; and in the manly heart of him he lamented his innate masculine brutality and formed the most delicate chivalrous plans for the right cherishing in the future of the dear lady who had confided herself to him.
SCENE XXI
In the white moonlight Sir Jasper Standish paced up and down the cobble-stoned yard with as monotonous a restlessness as if he had been hired this night to act the living sign at the Bear Inn, Devizes.
Each time he passed the low open window of the inn parlour, in which sat Mr. Stafford by the dim yellow light of two long-tongued tallow candles, the baronet would pause a moment to exchange from without a few dismal words with his friend. The latter, puffing at a long clay pipe, endeavoured in the intervals to while away the heavy minutes in the perusal of some tome out of mine host's library—a unique collection and celebrated on the Bath Road.
"Tom Stafford," said Sir Jasper, for the twentieth time, "how goes the hour?"
"Damned slowly, friend," said Stafford, consulting with a yawn the most exact of three watches at his fob. "To be precise, 'tis two minutes and one third since I told you that it wanted a quarter of midnight."