"Come on!" cried the Duke. "Your blasted monkeys sha'n't save you! Come on!"
The paragon honestly believed that his last hour on earth had now arrived, when another providential interruption took place.
"Help!" cried a feeble, failing bass voice. "Help! Murder! murder!"
"Whatever's that?" said Mr. Rodney, endeavouring to turn paler, but failing, since Providence has made no provision for any colour whiter than chalk. "What is it?"
"Help, help!" repeated the bass voice with a fainter accent.
"Crikey!" cried the boy with the sharply-pointed nose, making use of the emblematic word of extreme childhood—"crikey! if it isn't the innercent lydy stifling! My eye! what a lark!"
And he gave free vent to the very natural sense of humour roused in his youthful breast by so auspicious an occurrence. Now, the Duke was nothing if not chivalrous, and, on hearing the small boy's cheerful pronouncement, he exclaimed in a voice of thunder:
"An innocent lady stifling! Where—where is she?"
The boy with the sharply-pointed nose was unable to speak for laughing, but he indicated the mushroom-house with one hand, which he removed for the purpose from his little right knee, on which he had placed it as an assistance to his timely mirth.
"In there! An innocent lady in such a hole as that!" cried the Duke. "You scoundrel!"