"I invited the Quiney," he said gaily, "to give you a feeling of home among these strange faces. She will not dine with us, though, unless you choose."
"Let us be alone, to-night!" she pleaded.
"So be it. . . . But you shiver: you are cold. No? Then weary, perhaps—yes, and hungry. I've a backwoods hunger, for my part. Let us go down and dine."
BOOK IV.
LADY GOOD-FOR-NOTHING.
Chapter I.
BATTY LANGTON, CHRONICLER.
From Batty Langton, Esquire, to the Hon. Horatio Walpole.
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS,
January 21st, 1748.
. . . . . You ask me, my dear Sir, why I linger on year by year in this land of Cherokees and Choctaws, as you put it, at the same time hinting very delicately that now, with my poor old father in his grave and my own youthful debts discharged, you see no enduring reason for this exile. It is kind of you to be so solicitous: kinder still to profess that you yet miss me. But that I am missed at White's is more than you shall persuade me to believe. In an earlier letter, written when the Gaming Act passed, you told me they were for nailing up an escutcheon to mourn the death of play; they nailed up none for me. And I gather that play has recovered, and Dick Edgcumbe holds my cards. I doubt if I could endure to revisit St. James's—save by moonlight perhaps. Rappelez-moi to the waiters. They will remember me.