"Oh," stammered the sergeant, "he says that a certain Miss More——"
"I beg you pardon," cried the butler quickly, "I think you should speak of Lady Badington—my master left for Paris at eight o'clock this morning."
"What!" roared Moss—and you could have heard him on the Goodwin Sands—"Lord Badington's married her?"
"I believe those are the facts," says Hill, very quietly—and then—well, and then I sat down on the doorstep and I laughed until the tears ran down my face. Oh, Lord! oh, Lord!—and Moss's face! But you will understand all that, and how the sergeant looked, and the smile on the butler's face, without me saying a single word about it.
"Take a week's notice, and be d——d to you!" cried I, turning upon my master all of a sudden. "Do you think I'll serve with a man who sent policemen after his best customers? You go to hell, Moss—where you ought to have been long ago," and with that I just walked off down the drive, and Biggs with me. Lord, what an afternoon we had! And the night we spent afterwards in Ramsgate!
For, you see, it was quite true. Old Lord Badington, who never could look at a pretty woman twice without falling in love with her, found himself mostly alone with Mistress Dolly at Sandwich, and, by all that is true and wonderful, he married her.
Not that she was Dolly St. John at all, you must know, but Dolly Hamilton in reality; and connected, I am told, with the old American family, the Hamiltons of Philadelphia. What she did in London was done, I do believe, for the sheer excitement of doing it. And if folks have called her an adventuress, set that down to the rogues of trustees, who played ducks and drakes with her fortune, and left her in Europe to shift as best she might.
I got a hundred pounds for that job, sent by Miss Dolly herself from Venice. Moss got his car back, and three or four punctured tubes. Some day, I suppose, they'll pay him that seventy-five pounds sixteen shillings and four-pence. But I hope it won't be yet.
The Honorary John, they tell me, is very angry with his papa. But I'll back an old boy every time—notwithstanding what is written in the papers.