“Lady Armstrong, you mean. You’re forgetting your new dignity. Surely if the case stands thus you will ask the King to fulfill his promise and make you a baron at the least.”
“That will I not. I’ll trouble the badgered man no further.”
“I know the ways of the sex better than you do, and I warrant you the lady will give you no rest until the title’s yours, whenever she knows you have earned it and have had the offer of it.”
“She thinks less of these things than I do, even.”
“Then she is no peasant lass.”
“I never said she was.”
At this point, greatly to the delight of Armstrong, whose answers were becoming more and more short, his supper was announced, and Traquair with his arm over the shoulder of his guest, led him to the dining-room.
The tailor came when supper was finished, and measured his new customer, received minute directions concerning the garments, and retired protesting he would do his best in the limited time allowed him. The barber operated as well as he could on a head that began to nod in spite of the efforts of its owner. Sleep laid its heavy hand on Armstrong, and the voice of Traquair sounded distant and meaningless, something resembling the rush of Eden water in his ears, whereupon William nearly got those useful members cropped in earnest. At last he found himself in his room, and, for the first time since he left that hospitable mansion, enjoyed the luxury of lying between clean sheets with his clothes off. Then he slept as dreamlessly as his ancestors.