"I do, Mary. You thought him amiable!"
"He was the intimate friend of Lady Tinemouth," returned she, striving to look up; but the piercing expression she met from the eyes of Somerset, beating hers down again, covered her face and neck with deeper blushes. She panted for breath.
"Rely on me," said Pembroke, pitying her embarrassment, whilst he dreaded that her gentle heart had indeed become the victim of some accomplished and insidious foreigner—"rely on me, my beloved cousin: consider me as a brother. If you have entangled yourself—"
Miss Beaufort guessed what he would say, and interrupting him, added, with a more assured air, "No, Pembroke, I have no entanglements. I am going to ask your friendly assistance on behalf of a brave and unfortunate Polander." Pembroke reddened and she went on. "Mr. Constantine is a gentleman. Lady Tinemouth tells me he has been a soldier, and that he lost all his possessions in the ruin of his country. Her ladyship introduced him here. I have seen him often, and I know him to be worthy the esteem of every honorable heart. He is now in prison, in Newgate, for a debt of about thirty pounds, and I ask you to go and release him. That is my request—my secret; and I confide in your discretion that you will keep it even from him."
"Generous, beloved Mary!" cried Pembroke, pressing her hand; "it is thus you always act. Possessed of all the softness of thy sex, dearest girl," added he, still more affectionately, "nature has not alloyed it with one particle of weakness!"
Miss Beaufort smiled and sighed. If to love tenderly, to be devoted life and soul to one being, whom she considered as the most perfect work of creation, be weakness, Mary was the weakest of the weak; and with a languid despondence at her heart, she was opening her lips to give some directions to her cousin, when the attention of both was arrested by a shrill noise of speakers talking above stairs. Before the cousins had time to make an observation, the disputants descended towards the drawing-room, and bursting open the door with a violent clamor, presented the enraged figure of Lady Dundas followed by Diana, who, with a no less swollen countenance, was scolding vociferously, and dragging forward the weeping Euphemia.
"Ladies! ladies!" exclaimed Somerset, amazed at so extraordinary a scene; "what has happened?"
Lady Dundas lifted up her clenched hand in a passion.
"A jade!—a hussy!" cried her vulgar ladyship, incapable of articulating more.
Miss Dundas, still grasping the hands of her struggling sister, broke out next, and turning furiously towards Mary, exclaimed, "You see, madam, what disgrace your ridiculous conduct to that vagabond foreigner has brought on our family! This bad girl has followed your example, and done worse-she has fallen in love with him!"