“Catch what you can,” he retorted, “and find out what sort of thing it is—afterward.”
There was a great deal of scampering and laughing, of creeping into corners and huddling against walls. In the very glory of a stampede, when Tom Temple had sailed straight with his arms spread for a bunch of girls, the salon door opened, and a servant announced:
“My Lord Sussex.”
The dramatic humor of the moment was missed by all save Hortense and Lord Gore, so briskly and indiscriminately went the chase. My lord pursed up his lips and whistled with a significant lifting of the eyebrows. Hortense stifled a laugh.
Thomas Lennard, Lord Dacre, Earl of Sussex, was a prim aristocrat with very stately prejudices against fashionable horse-play. Moreover, he had one of those jealous and egotistical temperaments that persuades a man to believe that the woman whom he had honored with marriage should henceforth sit meekly at his feet—and play the mirror to his majesty.
He stood on the threshold, watching the whirligig of youth with the cold wrath of a man who had come with the full expectation of being offended. And to add to the irony of the moment, my Lady Anne came doubling down the room in close pursuit of a couple of men. She made her capture not three yards from her husband’s person, and made it gamely—with both arms round the neck of Sir Marmaduke Thibthorp of the thin shanks.
She whipped off the bandage with a breathless laugh.
“Gemini—but it’s Duke Thibthorp!”
The gallant, whose back was toward the door, offered a mouth, and caught his captor by the wrists.
“Forfeit, forfeit! A pledge—!”