"You may laugh, gentlemen," says I, with a sudden gravity, "but it is no laughing matter for us, let me tell you. My wife's pocket hath been picked, and how we are to get back home with not so much as a penny between us, strike me dead if I can say!"
"Why, 'tis a case for Mr. Jeremy's genius," says Cynthia, smiling at that flattered person in a most bewitching manner. "He must devise us a means out of his infinite wit."
"Peace, woman," says I, angrily. "Is it not enough then that you should lose all our travelling money and bring us into disgrace with our honest host, whom we are unable to requite for his hospitality, but you must lose the control of that unlucky tongue too, and let it grow so familiar with the name and attainments of one of the foremost persons of his age that it brings us into disrepute with him also?"
I spoke with my tongue in my cheek to be sure, and Cynthia more than once had to bite her lips to restrain her merriment. But Mr. Jeremy nodded his head delightedly all the time, and purred with satisfaction.
"No offence, no offence," says that gentleman. "Don't mind me, my pretty one. But since you ask my opinion as to 'ow you shall get back home again, I think after carefully considering all the circumstances, the only means I can discover is 'Shanks's mare.'"
"Ha ha! he he!" we all laughed at this desperate piece of wit.
The upshot was that we were allowed to depart indebted to the innkeeper in the sum of eightpence. The loss of our money was a blow. Why it should have been I cannot tell, for after all it was very little the right side of destitution. Cynthia was quite unable to say in what manner she had lost it, and when I came to put a few shrewd questions to her on the subject, she was so vague in her ideas and so uncertain in her answers, that it became a moot point at last whether her fortune of twelvepence halfpenny had not existed from the first in her imagination only.
CHAPTER X
WE ARE BESET BY A HEAVY MISFORTUNE
It was about sundown now. We had not so much as a penny to purchase a loaf of bread. Night was coming on; there were no friends to whom we might recommend ourselves; and at least two parties of persons were engaged in hunting us down in that vicinity. To set against these inconveniences we had only our liberty and our comradeship; and although our bellies were like to go empty, and our heads unpillowed that night, and for full many a weary one to come, we did not rail against our lot. We were as free as the air and could defy the polite conventions. Lest we should fall in again with Mr. Waring and our papa, or less dangerously with Mr. Jeremy, we decided to forsake the high road and its publicity, and take to the fields. All ways were alike to us; north, south, east, and west, it did not matter.