A mighty personage with fat chops and ruddy cheeks and rounded waistcoat and padded calves received us at the door of Sir John Kirke’s house in Drury Lane.  Sir John was not yet back from the Exchange, this grand fellow loftily informed us at the entrance to the house.  A glance told him that we had neither page-boy nor private carriage; and he half-shut the door in our faces.

“Now the devil take this thing for a half-baked, back-stairs, second-hand kitchen gentleman,” hissed M. Radisson, pushing in.  “Here, my fine fellow,” says he with a largesse of vails his purse could ill afford, “here, you sauce-pans, go tell Madame Radisson her husband is here!”

I have always held that the vulgar like insolence nigh as well as silver; and Sieur Radisson’s air sent the feet of the kitchen steward pattering.  “Confound him!” muttered Radisson, as we both went stumbling over footstools into the dark of Sir John’s great drawing-room, “Confound him!  An a man treats a man as a man in these stuffed match-boxes o’ towns, looking man as a man on the level square in the eye, he only gets himself slapped in the face for it!  An there’s to be any slapping in the face, be the first to do it, boy!  A man’s a man by the measure of his stature in the wilderness.  Here, ’tis by the measure of his clothes——­”

But a great rustling of flounced petticoats down the hallway broke in on his speech, and a little lady had jumped at me with a cry of “Pierre, Pierre!” when M. Radisson’s long arms caught her from her feet.

“You don’t even remember what your own husband looked like,” said he.  “Ah, Mary, Mary—­don’t dear me!  I’m only dear when the court takes me up!  But, egad,” says he, setting her down on her feet, “you may wager these pretty ringlets of yours, I’m mighty dear for the gilded crew this time!”

Madame Radisson said she was glad of it; for when Pierre was rich they could take a fine house in the West End like my Lord So-and-So; but in the next breath she begged him not to call the Royalists a gilded crew.

“And who is this?” she asked, turning to me as the servants brought in candles.

“Egad, and you might have asked that before you tried to kiss him!  You always did have a pretty choice, Mary!  I knew it when you took me!  That,” says he, pointing to me, “that is the kite’s tail!”

“But for convenience’ sake, perhaps the kite’s tail may have a name,” retorts Madame Radisson.

“To be sure—­to be sure—­Stanhope, a young Royalist kinsman of yours.”

“Royalist?” reiterates Mary Kirke with a world of meaning to the high-keyed question, “then my welcome was no mistake!  Welcome waits Royalists here,” and she gave me her hand to kiss just as an elderly woman with monster white ringlets all about her face and bejewelled fingers and bare shoulders and flowing draperies swept into the room, followed by a serving-maid and a page-boy.  With the aid