The great news that Mrs. Sundon and Mrs. Barlowe were to set off on horseback within the hour, availing themselves, by permission, of Miss Kingscote’s and Master Charles’s horses, in order to reach Lumley, where they were to hire a chaise to proceed on a journey of indefinite duration, fell flat. It was as nothing compared to the stunning shock inflicted on Miss Kingscote when Mrs. Sundon saw fit to communicate to the hostess the real rank and history of her companion. “Lud! lud! a Lady Bell all the time, and I to have gone and found fault with her, and kept her pottering about my business, mending lace, and cleaning silver, lud-a-mercy, what shall I do, brother? Mayn’t I be took up by the King or the Lords, like the ‘torney was, whom I’ve heard tell of, no farther gone than father and mother’s day, afore we came down in the world, and I were a mite of a child—he gave a warrant to arrest a fine lady in her coach in the street, at the suit of a tradesman, and he himself was had up before the justices—I mean afore the Lords, for an insult to the quality. Mayn’t I be had up and put in prison, though I never knowed, nor meant it, and I’ll beg her pardon over and over again, and she was a right-down pleasant lass, madam—Lud! I’m losing my head—lady, save when she was in the tantrums.” “Nonsense, Deb,” exclaimed Master Charles impatiently; “you did her a kindness, and helped her in her end. As it proves,” he continued a little sarcastically; “whether Miss or Madam, she has been all along far beyond our flight, and will never waste another thought on us, now that she has found birds of her own feather, and is ready to go off with them to her own perch.” “She were a runaway wife all the same,” reflected Miss Kingscote sapiently, “though she were ten times a Lady Bell, and she had left her man as must have been hers in the face of day, which made the leaving a heap bolder in my madam—nay, my lady. I vow I as good as telled her she was no match for the Kingscotes of Nutfield.” “You had nothing to do to say anything of the kind, even though this Lady Bell had been a simple waiting-maid or scullion. I don’t care which,” Master Charles was provoked into telling his sister, as his good-humoured indulgence gave way. “The Kingscotes have not kept their own in the world without loss, and they can ill afford to despise the humblest—I say that, if I am supposed to have anything to do with the future matching of the Kingscotes,” declared the young gentleman loftily, “and they’ll be long enough of being matched for me, since I could bring a mate to little better than a farm-house, and a farmer’s kin. I’ll thank you, Deb, not to meddle in the matter.”