“Thou art the most incorrigible wretch of thy years in London,” she said, “and it is impossible to help being angry with thee or to help forgiving thee.” The saunterers on the willow-shadowed banks came strolling in. Lady Fareham’s cornets and fiddles sounded a March in Alceste; and the party broke up in laughter and good temper, Mr. Dubbin being much complimented upon his having detected Spavinger’s boots. “I ought to know ’em,” he answered ruefully. “I lost a hundred meggs on him Toosday se’nnight, at Windsor races; and I had time to take the pattern of them boots while he was crawling in, a bad third.” CHAPTER XV. FALCON AND DOVE. “Has your ladyship any commands for Paris?” Lord Fareham asked, one August afternoon, when the ghost party at Millbank was almost forgotten amid a succession of entertainments on land and river; a fortnight at Epsom to drink the waters; and a fortnight at Tunbridge—where the Queen and Court were spending the close of summer—to neutralise the bad effects of Epsom chalybeates with a regimen of Kentish sulphur. If nobody at either resort drank deeper of the medicinal springs than Hyacinth—who had ordered her physician to order her that treatment—the risk of harm or the possibility of benefit was of the smallest. But at Epsom there had been a good deal of gay company, and a greater liberty of manners than in London; for, indeed, as Rochester assured Lady Fareham, “the freedom of Epsom allowed almost nothing to be scandalous.” And at Tunbridge there were dances by torchlight on the common. “And at the worst,” Lady Fareham told her friends, “a fortnight or so at the Wells helps to shorten the summer.” It was the middle of August when they went back to Fareham House, hot, dry weather, and London seemed to be living on the Thames, so thick was the throng of boats going up and down the river, so that with an afternoon tide running up it seemed as if barges, luggers, and wherries were moving in one solid block into the sunset sky. De Malfort had been attached to her ladyship’s party at Epsom, and at Tunbridge Wells. He had his own lodgings, but seldom occupied them, except in that period between four or five in the morning and two in the afternoon, which Rochester and he called night. His days were passed chiefly in attendance upon Lady Fareham—singing and playing, fetching and carrying combing her favourite spaniel with the same ivory pocket-comb that arranged his own waterfall curls; or reading a French romance to her, or teaching her the newest game of cards, or the last dancing-step imported from Fontainebleau or St. Cloud, or some new grace or fashion in dancing, the holding of the hand lower or higher; the latest manner of passaging in a bransle or a coranto, as performed by the French King and Madame Henriette, the two finest dancers in France; Condé, once so famous for his dancing, now appearing in those gay scenes but seldom.