Brummell ran his eyes hurriedly over the verses, while Wales continued pacing up and down the now crowded room in unabating fury.
"I saw them earlier in the evening, your Highness," said Sheridan, unable to keep his oar out of the troubled waters.
"Oh, did you, indeed?" demanded Wales. "And no doubt chuckled like the devil over them?"
"Your Highness!" said the aged wit, trying to speak reproachfully, in spite of an internal laugh that threatened to break out and ruin him.
"I believe you are quizzing me now if the truth were known," asserted the Prince, wrathfully suspicious. "If I am not mistaken, these lines sound marvellously like the work of your pen, sirrah."
"On my honor you wrong me, Sire," declared Sheridan, in a tone so unmistakably truthful that Wales could not doubt his entire innocence.
"May I not see the poem, Mr. Brummell?" asked Dyke, who had just entered the room.
The Beau obligingly handed over the paper to the old gentleman. As the old rhymer turned away, Moore looked over his shoulder and, scanning with eager eyes the page in quest of the satire which had so enraged the Regent, found it before the elder man's less keen sight had performed a like service for him. Moore turned sick with horror and clutched the nearest chair for support. How had the verses found their way into print? Dyke was ruined if it were proved that he wrote them. Bessie, too, would feel the weight of the Regent's displeasure, and without doubt would be deprived of her position at Drury Lane for her father's additional punishment. He had saved them from one disaster only to see them plunged hopelessly into another almost as dire.
A groan from the unhappy author announced that he, too, had recognized his poem. The next moment he turned on Moore with a look of despair on his usually placid face.
"Tom," he whispered, "you have ruined me. My poem is printed. Oh, Tom, how could you? How could you?"