‘A damned hot-livered roundhead coxcomb!’ said lord Worcester to himself, pacing his room.  ’These pelting cockerel squires and yeomen nowadays go strutting and crowing as if all the yard were theirs!  We shall see how far this heat will carry the rogue!  I doubt not the boy would tell everything than see his mare whipped.  He’s a fine fellow, and it were a thousand pities he turned coward and gave in.  But the affair is not mine; it is the king’s majesty’s.  Would to God the rascal were of our side!  He’s the right old English breed.  A few such were very welcome, if only to show some of our dainty young lordlings of yesterday what breed can do.  But an ass-foal it is!  To run his neck into a halter, and set honest people in mortal doubt whether to pull the end or no!

How on earth did he ever dream of carrying off a horse out of the very courts of Raglan castle!  And yet, by saint George! he would have done it too, but for that brave wench of a Vaughan!  What a couple the two would make!  They’d give us a race of Arthurs and Orlandos between them.  God be praised there are such left in England!  And yet the rogue is but a pestilent roundhead—­the more’s the pity!  Those coward rascals need never have mauled him like that.  Yet had the blow gone a little deeper it had been a mighty gain to our side.  Out he shall not go till the war be over!  It would be downright treason.’

So ran the thoughts of the marquis as he paced his chamber.  But at length he lay down once more, and sought refuge in sleep.

CHAPTER XXXI.

The sleepless.

There were more than the marquis left awake and thinking; amongst the rest one who ought to have been asleep, for the thoughts that kept her awake were evil thoughts.

Amanda Serafina Fuller was a twig or leaf upon one of many decaying branches, which yet drew what life they had from an ancient genealogical tree.  Property gone, but the sense of high birth swollen to a vice, the one thought in her mother’s mind, ever since she grew capable of looking upon the social world in its relation to herself, had been how, with stinted resources, to make the false impression of plentiful ease.  For one of the most disappointing things in high descent is, that the descent is occasionally into depths of meanness.  Some who are proudest of their lineage, instead of finding therein a spur to nobility of thought and action, find in it only a necessity for prostrating themselves with the more abject humiliation at the footstool of Mammon, to be admitted into the penetralia of which foul god’s favours, they will hasten to mingle the blood of their pure descent with that of the very kennels, yellow with the gold to which a noble man, if poor as Jesus himself, would loathe to be indebted for a meal.  In ‘the high countries’ there will be a finding of levels more appalling than strange.