“With your leave, or without it,” cries Peggy in a voice that causes Chockey to lift the loft-cover an inch higher, and so, kneeling with nose flattened against floor, to behold her mistress’s fine and splendid show of valor. “I’d have you hear, Sir, that to persons of fashion the matter of your suit near Lady Diana Weston’s a jeer and jest of the first flavour,—for ’twere easy seen a lady of her quality, Sir, ’d not be a-wasting her time on you.”
“Damme! Sir!” cries Sir Percy, now thoroughly aroused and far more in earnest than ever he was at the beginning. “You lie! Aye, My Lords, Sirs, and Gentlemen! Nay, ye can not stop my mouth,” unsheathing his rapier; Peggy does likewise, each pushing and warding from them the restraining hands and words of their associates.
“A foul lie! My errand up in town, Sir Robin McTart, is to try to drown my sorrows as I may, because the only lady that ever I loved set me the pace to the devil by a-refusing of my suit come Easter-day, three months to an hour ago.”
Lady Peggy flushes under the coffee stains; her arm trembles; but she is valiantly happy and confident, and her heart goes beating the joyfullest sort of a tune beneath the ’broidered waistcoat she’d made for her twin.
“And her name,” cries Sir Percy with a glance of imperious, aggressive temper shot right into Peggy’s very face,—“her name’s not Lady Diana Weston, but ’tis Lady Peggy Burgoyne!—”
Now Chock’s whole head slips leash, and she bends with bated breath and heaving breast to listen closer.
Lady Peggy starts, but waving her rapier over her head, laughs loud, long and derisively.
“Lady Peggy Burgoyne, Sir,” shaking the hilt of his weapon under Peg’s nose, repeats Sir Percy. “And until you, Sir, with your damnable arts and silly bumpkin ways, when she encountered you in Kent, had turned her from me, she was to me kindest of ladies and of loves. Your servant, Sir Robin McTart,” concludes Percy with a low bow, sticking the floor with his rapier-point, “when and where you please!”
“Here and now!” cries Peg, her heart a-thumping for joy, but so pleasured and alas! so puzzled with the getting out of a scrape, which she has found so little difficulty in getting into, that she is feign on, and make the best cut she can with her cloth.
“Here and now!” repeats Her Ladyship, “for I do throw back into Your Lordship’s teeth the lie”—Peg bows low to her opponent—“you gave me whiles, and affirm that for these many years, or ever you, Sir, set eyes upon her, Lady Peggy Burgoyne’s been mine, heart and soul, Sir!”