“Again,” she said, passing no judgment, “there is a story of a merchant that lived in Hampstead and drove one night with a plump daughter in a coach to eat a dinner in the City. The coach was stopped on the Heath by a highwayman who wanted nothing of the merchant, but was most gallant to his daughter.”
“I kissed the girl,” said Sir Harry. “It was done for a wager and I won it. A folly, and a harmless one,” but he wondered, if she had heard of these, if there were less innocent escapades that she had heard of. There was no lack of them, nor, it appeared, of babblers eager to gossip, to his disservice, about a man on whom the Regent frowned.
“One hears again,” she said, “that at Drury Lane Theater,”—he blushed in good earnest: would she have the hardihood to mention a pretty actress who—? and then he breathed again as she went on—“there was once an orange wench—”
“That was a bet I lost,” he said. “I was to dress as a woman and stand with my basket like the rest, and I was not to be identified. I was identified and paid. But what are these but the freaks we all enjoy in London? Vain trifles, I admit it, in the telling. Not feats to boast of, not incidents that I take pleasure in hearing you refer to, but, I protest, innocent enough and relishable in the doing.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “And while you relished them in London, did you give thought to what I did at home?”
“You? To what you did? What did you do?” Sir Harry was flabbergasted at her question.
“I was at home, Sir Harry.” She spoke without bitterness, without emphasis, and when he looked sharply at her, she seemed to interpret the look as an invitation and rose. “My mother, I think, is ready to accompany us if you care to take me walking in the Park.”
Decidedly a check to a gentleman who proposed to make up for past delays by a whirlwind wooing. She was at home, while he ruffled it in London. And where else should she be? What did she imply? At any rate, she had embarrassed him by the unexpectedness of her attack. Of course she was at home, and of course he was a reveler in London. He was man, she woman, and he hoped she recognized the elementary distinction. Whatever her object, whether she had the incredible audacity to accuse him—him, open-handed Harry—of something only to be defined as meanness, or whether she was only being witty with him, she had certainly discouraged the declaration he came to make.
Mrs. Vemers found him a moody squire of dames in the Park, while his sudden puzzlement gave Dorothy a mischievously happy promenade. He brought them, after the shortest of walks, to their door.
“You have been very silent, Sir Harry,” Mrs. Verners told him, with her incurable habit of stating the obvious. “Are you not well to-day?”