“If your grace pleases, and you will bring the act....” “Bring it?” He raised his eyebrows. His lip curled a little as he looked round the dingy green room. “You do not propose, child, that I should read it here?” He laughed in dismissal of the notion. “But where else, then?” she asked, a little bewildered. “Where else but in my own house? What other place were proper?” “Oh!” She was dismayed a little. An uneasiness, entirely instinctive, beset her once again. It urged her to draw back, to excuse herself. Yet reason combated instinct. It were a folly to offend him by a refusal? Such a thing would be affronting by its implication of mistrust; and she was very far from wishing to affront him. He observed the trouble in her blue eyes as she now regarded him, but affected not to observe it, and waited for her to express herself. She did so after a moment’s pause, faltering a little. “But ... at your house.... Why, what would be said of me, your grace? To come there alone....” “Child! Child!” he interrupted her, his tone laden with gentle reproach. “Can you think that I should so lightly expose you to the lewd tongues of the Town? Alone? Give your mind peace. I shall have some friends to keep you in countenance and to join you as audience to hear what I have written. There shall be one or two ladies from the King’s House; perhaps Miss Seymour from the Duke’s here will join us; there is a small part for her in the play; and there shall be some friends of my own; maybe even His Majesty will honour us. We shall make a merry party at supper, and after supper you shall pronounce upon my Laura whom you are to incarnate. Is your hesitancy conquered?” It was, indeed. Her mind was in a whirl. A supper party at Wallingford House, at which in a sense she was to be the guest of honour, and which the King himself would attend! She would have been mad to hesitate. It was to enter the great world at a stride. Other actresses had done it--Moll Davis and little Nelly from the King’s House; but they had done it upon passports other than those of histrionic talent. She would have preferred that Miss Seymour should not have been included. She had no great opinion of Miss Seymour’s conduct. But there was a small part for her, and that was perhaps a sufficient justification. And so she cast aside her hesitation, and gladdened his grace by consenting to be present. CHAPTER VII THE PRUDE On the evening of the day that had seen the meeting between Holles and Tucker, at about the same hour that Sir John Lawrence was vainly representing at Whitehall the expediency of closing the theatres and other places of congregation in view of the outbreak of plague within the City itself, His Grace of Buckingham was sitting down to supper with a merry company in the great dining-room of Wallingford House.