HIS GRACE MAKES ADVANCES

The next morning I began casting about as to what I should do next.  There was no longer any chance of getting at the secret from Dorothy, if secret there were.  Whilst I am ruminating comes a great battling at the street door, and Jack Comyn blew in like a gust of wind, rating me soundly for being a lout and a blockhead.

“Zooks!” he cried, “I danced the soles off my shoes trying to get in here yesterday, and I hear you were moping all the time, and paid me no more attention than I had been a dog scratching at the door.  What! and have you fallen out with my lady?”

I confessed the whole matter to him.  He was not to be resisted.  He called to Banks for a cogue of Nantsey, and swore amazingly at what he was pleased to term the inscrutability of woman, offering up consolation by the wholesale.  The incident, he said, but strengthened his conviction that Mr. Manners had appealed to Dorothy to save him.  “And then,” added his Lordship, facing me with absolute fierceness, “and then, Richard, why the devil did she weep?  There were no tears when I made my avowal.  I tell you, man, that the whole thing points but the one way.  She loves you.  I swear it by the rood.”

I could not help laughing, and he stood looking at me with such a whimsical expression that I rose and flung my arms around him.

“Jack, Jack!” I cried, “what a fraud you are!  Do you remember the argument you used when you had got me out of the sponging-house?  Quoting you, all I had to do was to put Dorothy to the proof, and she would toss Mr. Marmaduke and his honour broadcast.  Now I have confessed myself, and what is the result?  Nay, your theory is gone up in vapour.”

“Then why,” cried his Lordship, hotly, “why before refusing me did she demand to know whether you had been in love with Patty Swain?  ’Sdeath! you put me in mind of a woman upon stilts—­a man has always to be walking alongside her with encouragement handy.  And when a proud creature such as our young lady breaks down as she hath done, ’tis clear as skylight there is something wrong.  And as for Mr. Manners, Hare overheard a part of a pow-wow ’twixt him and the duke at the Bedford Arms,—­and Chartersea has all but owned in some of his drunken fits that our little fop is in his power.”

“Then she is in love with some one else,” I said.

“I tell you she is not,” said Comyn, still more emphatically; “and you can write that down in red in your table book.  Gossip has never been able to connect her name with that of any man save yours, when she went for you in Castle Yard.  And, gemini, gossip is like water, and will get in if a crack shows.  When the Marquis of Wells was going to Arlington Street once every day, she sent him about his business in a fortnight.”