“What!”
“Whom you have had the audacity to bring with you into this—my house.”
“My dear madam!” cried Lady Tilborough, indignantly.
“Silence, woman!” shouted the furious wife. “Do you think me blind? Did I not see you and your confederate plotting together just now to try and hide his shame?”
“No,” cried Granton; “nothing of the kind.”
“Laura!” roared Sir Hilton. “You must be mad!”
“Mad? Ha, ha!” cried Lady Lisle, hysterically, and covering three yards in a gliding rush that would have been a triumph upon the stage she seized the Polar bear skin with both hands, whisked it off, and displayed the sleeping figure of poor little Molly, flushed, dishevelled, not to say touzled, by the heavy covering from which she had been freed, and just aroused sufficiently to open a pair of pretty red lips and say drowsily—
“Kiss me, dear.”
“Ha!” ejaculated Lady Lisle, with her eyes darting daggers, and her fingers playing instinctively the part of a savage barbarian-woman face to face with the rival who has supplanted her with the man she loved—they crooked themselves into claws.
“Well, I am blowed!” exclaimed Sir Hilton, with a puzzled look of horror and despair so wildly comical, aided as it was by his making a drag with both hands at his already too thin hair.