“No, no; but Hortense.”
My lady looked at him with open eyes.
“Hortense! Why, she has only seen him perhaps twice in her life. And then—?”
“His Majesty? Oh, Mr. Charles is—well, her banker. It would be like Hortense; it is the blood, and the southern fire in her.”
“But how do you know this?”
He flipped her playfully on the chin.
“How long have I lived in the world, Nan, and how much do I know about women?”
XXI
A blustering, cheerless wind beat up over the hills as John Gore rode the last five miles of a three days’ journey, and saw the vague glimmer of the distant city clinging to the loops of the river Thames. Scudding clouds made the sky cold and full of a gray hurrying unrest, though it was splashed toward the west with stormy gouts of gold.
John Gore rode over the heathlands, with the furze-bushes shivering as the wind swished through them; and the sandy road was dry and adrift with dust, although the sky looked so wet and sullen. The servant behind him on the cob kept a sharp eye cocked on the hollows of the heath and the knolls of furze, and nursed his blunderbuss for comfort, though his face looked as red and as round as the sunny side of an apple. Here and there clumps of stunted hollies jostled each other, their whisperings making the evening seem doubly gray and dreary. An unhallowed dusk was creeping over the landscape—an unhallowed dusk that made travellers imagine footpads lurking behind the thorn-bushes or the furze.