Sure, one might let an innocent bundle of swans’ down and baby cheeks have its foibles without laying rough hands upon them!

The next,—­little Rebecca cries out that I’ve insulted her, is in floods of tears, and marches off on the young gentleman’s arm.

Comes a clatter of slippered heels on the hall floor and in bustles my Lady Kirke, bejewelled and befrilled and beflounced till I had thought no mortal might bend in such massive casings of starch.

“La,” she pants, “good lack!—­Wellaway!  My fine savage!  Welladay!  What a pretty mischief have you been working?  Proposals are amaking at the foot of the stairs.  O—­lud!  The preacher was akissing that little Puritan maid as I came by!  Good lack, what will Sir John say?”

And my lady laughs and laughs till I look to see the tears stain the rouge of her cheeks.

“O-lud,” she laughs, “I’m like to die!  He tried to kiss the baggage!  And the little saint jumps back so quick that he hit her ear by mistake!  La,” she laughs, “I’m like to die!”

I’d a mind to tell her ladyship that a loosening of her stays might prolong life, but I didn’t.  Instead, I delivered the message from Pierre Radisson and took myself off a mighty mad man; for youth can be angry, indeed.  And the cause of the anger was the same as fretteth the Old World and New to-day.  Rebecca was measuring Jack by old standards.  I was measuring Rebecca by new standards.  And the measuring of the old by the new and the new by the old teareth love to tatters.

Pierre Radisson I met at the entrance to the Fur Company’s offices in Broad Street.  His steps were of one on steel springs and his eyes afire with victory.

“We’ve beaten them,” he muttered to me.  “His Majesty favours us!  His Majesty accepted the furs and would have us at Whitehall to-morrow night to give account of our doings.  An they try to trick me out of reward I’ll have them to the foot o’ the throne!”

But of Pierre Radisson’s intrigue against his detractors I was not thinking at all.

“Were the courtiers about?” I asked.

“Egad! yes; Palmer and Buckingham and Ashley leering at Her Grace of Portsmouth, with Cleveland looking daggers at the new favourite, and the French ambassador shaking his sides with laughter to see the women at battle.  His Royal Highness, the Duke of York, got us access to present the furs.  Egad, Ramsay, I am a rough man, but it seemed prodigious strange to see a king giving audience in the apartments of the French woman, and great men leering for a smile from that huzzy!  The king lolls on a Persian couch with a litter of spaniel puppies on one side and the French woman on the other.  And what do you think that black-eyed jade asks when I present the furs and tell of our captured Frenchmen?  To have her own countrymen sold to the Barbadoes so that she may have the money for her gaming-table!  Egad, I spiked that pretty plan by saying the Frenchmen were sending her a present of furs, too!  To-morrow night we go to Whitehall to entertain His Majesty with our doings!  We need not fear enemies in the Company now!”