So, equipped with such a fund of knowledge and any amount of surmise, Her Ladyship replied coyly beneath her mask:
“Why do you think so, Sir Robin, and pray if I were Lady Peggy, what, now, would you be afther saying to me?”
“Zounds! ’tis she!” exclaims the Baronet, carried away by the fact that Lady Biddy’s hand beneath her cloak has more than half-way met his own moist and trembling fingers.
“Loveliest of women! Oh, ’twas indeed by your express directions, was’t not, that Mr. Incognito on Monday, watching for me in High Holborn nigh the shop of Mounseer Jabot, bid me come here to-night to meet you?”
Lady Biddy, although much averse to the clammy touch of her cavalier, gives his fingers an assuring pressure.
“Why, oh, why!” pursues Sir Robin, now as much elated by this tacit confession of her passion for him, as he was but lately overwhelmed by the mention of such strange words as “hanging, highwayman, Sir Percy de Bohun,” etc., etc., “why have you seen fit to keep me in such a length of suspense? Why have I not been allowed, before this, to behold you, and renew the days of our sojourn in Kent? Speak, my angel, speak!”
“La, Sir!” murmurs Lady Biddy, minx-like, ever anxious to get at the heart of this now much deepened enigma, “la, Sir, do you not know but too well the whys and wherefores of my secrecy?” Her Ladyship from Cork actually squeezes the little Baronet’s crooked little hand.
“That do I not! Mr. Incognito never would tell me aught, but thus and so; and bade me, from your adorable lips, keep myself in seclusion and safety,—nor ever,” continues he, his tone sinking to a mere breath, “endanger my precious self,” now stooping to imprint a chaste kiss on Her Ladyship’s hand, “in the meeting even once of Sir Percy de Bohun, for he had sworn to kill me on beholding me. Dearest life,” proceeds Sir Robin, withdrawing Lady Biddy a bit into the shade of the great trees, “I have obeyed your commands. I have never set eyes upon the scoundrel, but have kept myself close housed at my inn in Pimlico, awaiting your dear pleasure.”
“Have ye?” murmurs Lady Biddy, now more bewildered than she ever was before in her life, and seeing no clear way, either to read the puzzle or, truth to tell, to elude the gentleman. Yet the wits of a lady, especially if she happen to have been born in Ireland, may usually be trusted to extricate her from almost any dilemma; therefore, when Sir Robin has done swearing of his impatient probation passed at the Puffled Hen, says she, tweaking her hoop and making a courtesy:
“Lud! Robin,” (the hussy!) “but you are a killing creature! Nay, nay!” drawing out a few steps, he after her, from the shade of the trees and more in the flare of the twinkling globe lamps. “Nay, tarry here but a moment; there are the same reasons for your not accompanying me now that have prevailed upon me to keep our matters secret hitherto. I pray you, stir not from the neighborhood of this wooden lion—see?—until I return, which I will do presently.”