“Seek me, Sir, and Godspeed you down to Kennaston or Kent!”
At the word, Sir Robin in his chair sets forth a-swinging round the corner, light of heart and bright of hope, while the subject and object of his thoughts and passion stands for a moment leaning, sighing, betwixt laughter and tears, against the door-frame.
My Lady Peggy’s first impulse is to cut and run; indeed her slim legs are so stretched to begin, when the remembrance of poor Chock in her garret cage comes to her mind, and, with a grimace, she turns in, jumps up the stairs, and is in the midst of the group, now well on in their cups and more hilarious than orderly in their conversation.
Peg was not her father’s girl for naught that night. To the tune of three hundred pounds, fourteen and six, was she the richer, and rewarded for the many dreary evenings she had spent at Kennaston, a-watching her father win and lose with the Vicar and the Bishop, whenever the latter came on his visits.
By dint of spilling her wine deftly under the table, she had emptied as many mugs as the best bibber among ’em, and at four in the morning found herself the only one who was sober, or even awake.
’Twas not a beautiful sight thus to behold, in the pale pink of the dawn, a dozen or so of merry gentlemen a-sprawling about on floor, tables, chairs,—a-snoring and a-tossing in their sleep; but ’twas of the fashion of the times when, to be a fine gentleman, one must be drunk, at the least, once in the twenty-four hours.
All save Sir Percy; almost at swords’ points he had quitted the company hours before, a little in his cups, but steady withal, murmuring to himself as he fumbled on the rickety stairs—Peg, leaning over the rail, unseen in the darkness, womanlike to watch lest he trip and fall, heard him:
“’Sdeath! an what that popinjay say be true, I’ll marry Lady Diana out of hand, and show the minx I’m not to be cut out of a wife by such a flea-bitten rotten-rod as Sir Robin McTart!”
“So easy taken then is my loss!” says Peggy, with a renewed fire of jealousy burning at her heart, as she returns to the scene of her winnings.
Sick at heart, for a single instant she surveys the room, and then, finger on lip, it does not take her long to signal up to Chockey, motion her down with the calf-skin box, and to begin, with shamed face, in the darkest corner, to strip off her man’s attire.