Can make yours bleed a tear
Or pierce it anywhere——
This youth was proud of tracing a collateral relationship with the genial Cavalier singer, whom he was fond of quoting in season and out of season. He was a poet himself, or fancied so; cultivated loose locks, open collars and flying ties—something also of poetic license in other matters besides verse. But as his spirits were as inexhaustible as his purse—and he was at heart a guileless boy—there were not many who would hold him in rigour.
Lady Lochore looked at him with approval, as he lay stretched at her feet, just then pleasantly occupied in sticking his decapitated daisies into Miss Priscilla’s uncovered curls—a process to which that damsel submitted without so much as a blink of her demure eyelid.
“Heart!” echoed Lady Lochore. She had received that morning a postal application for overdue interest, and Tom Villars had been so detachedly sympathetic that there were no tortures she would not now cheerfully have inflicted upon him. “Heart!” she cried again, “why don’t you know what is going to happen, when the poor old machine that is Tom Villars comes to a standstill at last——”
“There will be a great concourse of physicians,” broke in Colonel Harcourt, whose wit was not equal to his humour, “and when they’ve taken off his wig and his stays and cut him open——”
“Out will fall,” interrupted Herrick, “the portrait of his dear cousin Rebecca—whom he loved in the days of George II.
‘Be she likewise one of those
That an acre hath of nose——’”
“The physician will find a dreadful little withered fungus,” pursued Lady Lochore, unheeding.