“I meant to say, the nearer the heart the dearer the blame. A cut against a first cousin may go wrong—but a bosom friend—oh! how I have succeeded against best friends; scolded all the while, of course, and called a monster. But there is Sir Stephen bowing to you.” Then, as Lady Cecilia kissed her hand to him from the window, Churchill went on: “By the by, without any scandal, seriously I heard something—I was quite concerned—that he had been of late less in his study and more in the boudoir of ———. Surely it cannot be true!”
“Positively false,” said Lady Cecilia.
“At every breath a reputation dies,” said Beauclerc.
“‘Pon my soul, that’s true!” said the aide-de-camp. “Positively, hit or miss, Horace has been going on, firing away with his wit, pop, pop, pop! till he has bagged—how many brace?”
Horace turned away from him contemptuously, and looked to see whereabouts Lady Davenant might be all this time.
CHAPTER XIV.
Lady Davenant was at the far end of the room engrossed, Churchill feared, by the newspaper; as he approached she laid it down, and said,—
“How scandalous some of these papers have become, but it is the fault of the taste of the age. ‘Those who live to please, must please to live.’”