I did not press the matter further at that moment, believing it would be indelicate.
"Shall we go to the nursery?" asked Julia.
I was delighted; and, romping with her lovely children, dressing their dolls, and teaching them to skip, I forgot my love for Argyle, as much as if that excellent man had never been born.
Indeed I am not quite sure that it would have occurred to me, even when I went home, but that Fred Lamb, who was just at this period showing Argyle up all over the town as my amorous shepherd, had a new story to relate of his grace.
Horace Beckford and two other fashionable men, who had heard from Frederick of my cruelty as he termed it, and the duke's daily romantic walks to the Jew's Harp House, had come upon him by accident in a body, as they were galloping through Somers-town. Lorne was sitting in a very pastoral fashion on a gate near my door, whistling. They saluted him with a loud laugh. No man could, generally speaking, parry a joke better than Argyle: for few knew the world better: but this was no joke. He had been severely wounded and annoyed by my cutting his acquaintance altogether, at the very moment when he had reason to believe that the passion he really felt for me was returned. It was almost the first instance of the kind he had ever met with. He was bored and vexed with himself for the time he had lost, and yet he found himself continually in my neighbourhood, almost before he was aware of it. He wanted, as he has told me since, to meet me once more by accident, and then he declared he would give me up.
"What a set of consummate asses you are," said Argyle to Beckford and his party; and then quietly continued on the gate, whistling as before.
"But r-e-a-l-l-y, r-e-a-l-l-y, ca-ca-cannot Tom She-She-She-Sheridan assist you, marquis?" said the handsome Horace Beckford, in his usual stammering way.
"A very good joke for Fred Lamb, as the case stands now," replied the duke, laughing: for a man of the world must laugh in these cases, though he should burst with the effort.
"Why don't she come?" said Sir John Shelley, who was one of the party.
An odd mad-looking Frenchman, in a white coat and a white hat, well known about Somers-town, passed at this moment and observed his grace, whom he knew well by sight, from the other side of the way. He had, a short time before, attempted to address me when he met me walking alone, and inquired of me when I had last seen the Marquis of Lorne, with whom he had often observed me walking. I made him no answer. In a fit of frolic, as if everybody combined at this moment against the poor, dear, handsome Argyle, the Frenchman called, as loud as he could scream, from the other side of the way, "Ah! ah! oh! oh! vous voilà, monsieur le Comte Dromedaire," alluding thus to the duke's family name, as pronounced Camel. "Mais ou est donc madame la Comtesse?"