“Well,” said the gentleman softly, “you must present my compliments to him when you see him. Don’t forget.”
“This is not to the point!” exclaimed Peregrine. “I have challenged you to fight, sir!”
“I don’t think your guardian would advise you to press your challenge,” replied the gentleman with a slight smile.
Judith laid a hand on her brother’s arm, and said coldly: “You have not told us yet by what name we may describe you to Lord Worth.”
His smile lingered. “I think you will find that his lordship will know who I am,” he said, and took Lord Worcester’s arm, and strolled with him into the coffee-room.
Chapter IV
It was with difficulty that Miss Taverner succeeded in preventing her brother from following the stranger and Lord Worcester into the coffee-room and there attempting to force an issue. He was out of reason angry, but upon Judith’s representing to him how such a scene could only end in a public brawl which must involve her, as the cause of it, he allowed himself to be drawn away, still declaring that he would at least know the stranger’s name.
She pushed him up the stairs in front of her, and in the seclusion of her own room gave him an account of her adventure. It was not, after all, so very bad; there had been nothing to alarm her, though much to enrage. She made light of the circumstance of the stranger’s kissing her: he would bestow just such a careless embrace on a pretty chambermaid, she dared say. It was certain that he mistook her station in life.
Peregrine could not be content. She had been insulted, and it must be for him to bring the stranger to book. As she set about the task of arguing him out of this determination, Judith realized that she had rather bring the gentleman to book herself. To have Peregrine settle the business could bring her no satisfaction; it must be for her to punish the stranger’s insolence, and she fancied that she could do so without assistance.
When Peregrine went downstairs again to the coffee-room the strange gentleman had gone. The landlord, still harassed and busy with the company, could not tell Peregrine his name, nor even recall having served Lord Worcester. So many gentlemen had crowded into his inn to-day that he could not be blamed for forgetting half of them. As for a team of blood-chestnuts, he could name half a dozen such teams; they might all have drawn up at the George for anything he knew. Peregrine could only be sorry that Mr. Fitzjohn was already on his way back to London: he might have known the stranger’s name.