At first clap of voices Peggy stuck her hair back into the drawer, jumped up, and stood, hand upon the dressing-table, her expression like nothing else so much as that of a fawn caught in a thicket.
“’Sdeath! Gentlemen, I pray of you, a few moments grace!” cries she, trembling from the knees down, for ’tis quite of the temper of the manners of the day that in a second more the whole company should batter down the mahogany and burst in.
“Three-and-thirty, an you like, Sir Robin!” says Escombe, who is soberer than the rest.
“Give us the whereabouts of Lady Peggy Burgoyne,” shouts Mr. Chalmers, “and we’ll trouble you no more ’til doomsday!”
“Lady Peggy Burgoyne!”
“Lady Peggy Burgoyne!”
“Where’s Lady Peggy Burgoyne?”
“Where’s Lady Peggy Burgoyne?”
“Where is the fair one for whom you and Sir Percy de Bohun have fought with blades and tongues, twice now, since this day last week?”
“Lady Peggy Burgoyne!” cried they in hot concert, joined in most lustily by the Beau from his bed across the corridor, and accompanied by the pounding of fifteen rapier points on the parquet, and thirty fists on the woodwork, as well as the demoniacal screams of the Beau’s little negro and the parrot on his wrist.