‘A fig for your desolation!’ her ladyship cried rudely.  ’It don’t help me, Smith.’

‘But your ladyship sees how it is.’

‘I am hanged if I do!’ she retorted, and used an expression too coarse for modern print.  ‘But I suppose that there is another house, man.’

‘Certainly, my lady—­several,’ the landlord answered, with a gesture of deprecation.  ’But all full.  And the accommodation not of a kind to suit your ladyship’s tastes.’

‘Then—­what are we to do?’ she asked with angry shrillness.

‘We have fresh horses,’ he ventured to suggest.  ’The road is good, and in four hours, or four and a half at the most, your ladyship might be in Bath, where there is an abundance of good lodgings.’

‘Bless the man!’ cried the angry peeress.  ’Does he think I have a skin of leather to stand this jolting and shaking?  Four hours more!  I’ll lie in my carriage first!’

A small rain was beginning to fall, and the night promised to be wet as well as cold.  Mr. Thomasson, who had spent the last hour, while his companion slept, in visions of the sumptuous dinner, neat wines, and good beds that awaited him at the Castle Inn, cast a despairing glance at the doorway, whence issued a fragrance that made his mouth water.  ‘Oh, positively,’ he cried, addressing the landlord, ’something must be done, my good man.  For myself, I can sleep in a chair if her ladyship can anyway be accommodated.’

‘Well,’ said the landlord dubiously, ’if her ladyship could allow her woman to lie with her?’

‘Bless the man!  Why did you not say that at once?’ cried my lady.  ’Oh, she may come!’ This last in a voice that promised little comfort for the maid.

‘And if the reverend gentleman—­would put up with a couch below stairs?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Mr. Thomasson; but faintly, now it came to the point.

’Then I think I can manage—­if your ladyship will not object to sup with some guests who have just arrived, and are now sitting down?  Friends of Sir George Soane,’ the landlord hastened to add, ’whom your ladyship probably knows.’

‘Drat the man!—­too well!’ Lady Dunborough answered, making a wry face.  For by this time she had heard all about the duel.  ’He has nearly cost me dear!  But, there—­if we must, we must.  Let me get my tooth in the dinner, and I won’t stand on my company.’  And she proceeded to descend, and, the landlord going before her, entered the house.

In those days people were not so punctilious in certain directions as they now are.  My lady put off her French hood and travelling cloak in the lobby of the east wing, gave her piled-up hair a twitch this way and that, unfastened her fan from her waist, and sailed in to supper, her maid carrying her gloves and scent-bottle behind her.  The tutor, who wore no gloves, was a little longer.  But having washed his hands at a pump in the scullery, and dried them on a roller-towel—­with no sense that the apparatus was deficient—­he tucked his hat under his arm and, handling his snuff-box, tripped after her as hastily as vanity and an elegant demeanour permitted.