"He'd better not!" Captain Dove commented. "I'll wring his neck for him if he tries—"
"And, as for Sallie," Slyne cut him short, "I've made things quite—"
"Sallie will do whatever I tell her," growled Captain Dove. "And don't you attempt to interfere between me and her—till you've paid me my money, Slyne. Where is she? Fetch her in here."
Slyne had no farther to go to do that than to the next room, where he found Sallie at the window, gazing pensively out at the sea. But he delayed there for some time to make it still more clear to her that her only hope of helping herself lay in abetting him blindly.
When he at length returned to his own sitting-room with her, he found Captain Dove staring fixedly at another arrival there, an overwhelmingly up-to-date if rather imbecile-looking young man, whose general gorgeousness, combined with a very vacant, fish-like eye much magnified by a monocle, had evidently reduced the would-be fashionable seaman to a stricken silence.
Slyne, who had at first shot a most malevolent glance at the intruder, was stepping forward to greet him just as Mr. Jobling put in an appearance with a sheaf of papers in one hand.
"How d'ye do, Lord Ingoldsby?" said Slyne quite suavely to the young man with the eye-glass. He had caught sight of Mr. Jobling in the doorway, and turned to Sallie, his quick mind bent on a masterstroke.
"May I introduce to you the Marquis of Ingoldsby," he remarked to her in the monotone of convention; and, as she bowed slightly in response to that very modern young gentleman's ingratiating wriggle and grin, Slyne, one eye on Captain Dove's astonished countenance, completed the formality.
"This is Lady Josceline Justice," said he to his smirking lordship, and breathed delicately into a somewhat extensive ear the further information, "the late Earl of Jura's daughter, you know—and my fiancée."