“But what will your father say?”
“My father will say nothing. I have no need to marry the first lover with a title who presents himself. I am a lord’s daughter, passing rich—and passably good-looking, Will?”
“Be serious, Kitty.”
“Indeed I must, and say good-bye, Will,” she cried, as the strokes had ceased ringing out from Eastry Tower some two or three minutes, “for the minuet was for twelve o’clock, and I am engaged to Lord Dover—for that only. Good-bye, dear Will.”
With a sudden impulse she sprang forward, and laying her hands on his shoulders kissed him.
Hardly had she finished, when—
“What’s this, what’s this?” cried a bluff voice, with an accompanying thud of a lame man’s stick on the polished oak floor—“Will Hardres off to fight the French! Nay, lad, not so sudden! the coach does not start till six, and Cissy’s at school, and your mother going with you. This way, this way!”
He led Will into the ball-room and up to the Marquess.
“I have a favour to ask you, my Lord Dover. I wish Will Hardres here,” the nobleman bowed, “to lead the minuet with my daughter. We Fleets think it the greatest honour in the world to fight the French in a King’s ship; and Will is to have the special honour of sailing with Admiral Nelson—a greater man, to my mind, than St. Vincent, or Hood, or Howe.”
“As you please,” said the Marquess, in such a chilling way that Will, as he said, could have killed him, and I know the kind of light which came into Katherine’s eyes.