“Wherever she’s from, she did not tell me!” Mrs. Gilson snapped.
“Ah!”
“And what is more, if she had, I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Oh, come, come, ma’am!” Mr. Bishop was mildly shocked. “Oh, come, ma’am! That is not like you. Think of the King and his royal prerogative!”
“Fiddlesticks!”
Mr. Bishop looked quite staggered.
“You don’t mean it,” he said—“you don’t indeed. You would not have the Radicals and Jacobins ramping over the country, shooting honest men in their shops and burning and ravaging, and—and generally playing the devil?”
“I suppose you think it is you that stops them?”
“No, ma’am, no,” with a modest smile. “I don’t stop them. I leave that to the yeomanry—old England’s bulwark and their country’s pride! But when the yeomanry ’ve done their part, I take them, and the law passes upon them. And when they have been hung or transported and an example made, then you sleep comfortably in your beds. That is what I do. And I think I may say that next to Mr. Nadin of Manchester, who is the greatest man in our line out of London, I have done as much in that way as another.”
Mrs. Gilson sniffed contemptuously.