“Sold his soul to the Devil?” echoed Luke Herrick, lifting his handsome young face from the daisies he was piling in pretty Priscilla Geary’s pink silk lap. “Sold his soul, did he? Uncommon bargain for Beelzebub and Co.! I thought the firm did better business.”
“You are quite wrong,” said Lady Lochore, looking down with disfavour upon the countenance of her victim, who feigned excessive enjoyment of the ambient wit and humour. “The Devil cannot take Tom Villars’ soul, nor could Tom Villars sell it to the Devil, for the very good reason that Tom Villars never had a soul to be disposed of.”
A shout of laughter went round the glowing idle group.
“Cruel, cruel, lady mine!” murmured the oriental Villars, striving to throw a fire of pleading devotion into his close-set shallow eyes as he looked up at Lady Lochore and at the same time to turn a dignified deaf ear upon his less important tormentors. “In how have I offended that you thus make a pincushion of my heart?”
Mr. Villars knew right well that with Lady Lochore, as with the other fair of his acquaintance, his favour fell with the barometer of certain little negotiations. But it was a characteristic—no doubt maternally inherited—that soft as he was upon the pleasure side of nature, when it came to business, he was invulnerable.
At this point Mr. Herrick burst into song. He had a pretty tenor voice:
Come, bring your sampler, and with art
Draw in’t a wounded heart
And dropping here and there!
Not that I think that any dart