“Shut up!”

“I’d have given all I have in the world to have been there,” Jack continued, springing up in the ecstasy of his feelings. “A precious bad bargain she must have had! You stand for a model! You couldn’t, my dear fellow, to save your life. I say, aren’t you stiff? Everitt?”

“Well?”

“I believe it was the duke’s daughter put it into your head?”

“It’s true enough I get my folly from you,” said the elder man, not ill-humouredly.

“Oh, no more speeches of that sort! I’ve the whip-hand of you for a good while,” said Jack, triumphantly. “You can’t say I ever dressed up as a model to get into a house.”

“To get into a house!” Everitt frowned. “Certainly that was not my motive.”

“What then?” demanded the imperturbable Jack.

“Merely that that brute came drunk, and I had promised to send some one.”

“Oh!”