“Ods-body! you are not so far wrong there,” says I, turning a sigh into a yawn adroitly. “Hath he kissed you yet?”
“Once, I think, ma’am,” she answers, with a modest rose appearing through her pallor.
“Hath he an opinion of you, then, or was it pastime, merely?”
“’A told me I was kissable,” says she, “a pretty downcast sort of wench, your la’ship, and swore upon his beard that if he came out of this predicament with his heart still underneath his chin he’d the best half of his mind to marry me.”
Here the hussy sighed so desperately from the full depth of her bosom that a spasm was provoked within my own. To allay that pain I took the love-sick Mrs. Emblem by the arm and pinched her till she forgot her heart-ache in one that was less poetical.
Retiring to my earned repose, I found sleep at first as coy as she is in town. For half an hour I thought on the impudence of my maid, for another half on the folly of myself.
“Bab,” I soliloquised at the end of an hour’s meditation on this entertaining theme, “you should be whipt through every market town in Yorkshire. You are worse than an incorrigible rogue, you are an incorrigible fool; but any way at nine o’clock to-morrow morning you shall dismiss Mrs. Polly Emblem without a character.”
Had it not been that I had ratafia to compose me I doubt whether I should have had any sleep at all. The fear of discovery lay upon me like a stone. I was persuaded that we had been spied upon. Slumber, however, mercifully drew a curtain round the miserable consequences embodied in the future.
Emblem’s light hand woke me.
“Ten o’clock, your la’ship,” says she.