"So would not I," laughed the incorrigible cousin. "What with play and the haberdasher all I have left in the world is contained in the little box under my feet, and I should count that cheaply saved at the price of a kiss."
"You were not asked to pay the price," said Prue coldly. Then, thrusting her head out of the window, she relieved her pent-up feelings by soundly berating the cowardly serving-men who had yielded without a blow to a force so inferior and were now wasting precious time hunting for their useless weapons instead of hastening to the near-by crossroads to meet the mail-coach in which the two ladies proposed traveling from Yorkshire to London.
The two men clambered back into the rumble, somewhat shamefaced, and each striving by muttered disclaimers to reject the charge of cowardice in favor of the other. The postilion, suddenly galvanized into activity, roused the horses with strange oaths and cries and fierce cracklings of the whip. Prudence closed the window and retired into the voluminous shelter of her cloak, and the interrupted journey was resumed.
CHAPTER II
LADY DRUMLOCH
No further adventures overtook the two ladies. The mail-coach picked them up at the crossroads and carried them to London in course of time, where they were soon safely housed with their grandmother, Lady Drumloch.
My Lady Drumloch was, as all the world knows, a very great lady, and back in the days of King Charles the Second had been a beauty and a toast. The daughter of a duke and the wife of an earl, she had queened it in two courts, had gone into exile with King James, intrigued and plotted with the Jacobites, and finally, having lost husband and son and fortune in her devotion to a hopeless cause, had made her peace with Queen Anne and returned to England to eke out her last years in the soul-crushing poverty of the great.
But as with her she brought her two granddaughters, the Honorable Margaret Moffat and Lady Prudence Wynne, her meager little house on the outskirts of May fair soon became not only the Mecca of other Jacobites as aristocratic and as poor as herself, but of many who were neither Jacobites nor in reduced circumstances. Among both classes the Lady Prudence, though but fifteen, soon found courtiers to pick and choose from. The saucy child with her skin of milk and roses, her tangle of dark curling locks and her wonderful blue eyes, was already possessed of that mysterious charm of femininity by which the world has been swayed since the days of Eve.
To gratify her grandmother's ambition, and at the same time emancipate herself from the restrictions of the school-room, she married the Viscount Brooke, heir of the Earl of Overbridge. But the marriage resulted disastrously. The viscount had long before exhausted his private means, and although his father, hoping that marriage would sober and settle him, made a sufficiently liberal allowance to the young couple, a few months of reckless extravagance and gaiety plunged them in an ocean of debt, from which the viscount, in a fit of delirium, extricated himself by means of a bullet in his brain, leaving Prue a widow at sixteen with no home but her grandmother's little house in Mayfair, and not a penny beyond the grudging bounty of her father-in-law.
Still, it was delightful to be a widow, and, consequently, free from all authority. Having curtailed her mourning within the scantiest limits, she returned to society with renewed ardor, where her youth and beauty, enhanced by her widowhood, secured her a flattering welcome. She played the hostess in Lady Drumloch's shabby drawing-rooms, filling them with laughter, scandal and love-making. She chaperoned Margaret Moffat, who was ten years her senior and who loved her with the infatuation one sometimes, if rarely, observes in a very plain woman for a very beautiful one.