“Where are your wits, girl? Don’t gape like that! On my honor, I think you are mad.” She suffered her mother’s hectoring with an apathy that betrayed neither resentment nor understanding. Her eyes held John Gore’s for the moment. Then she turned and walked back to the window as though she had no more interest in the affair. Yet—she had seen on the cloak that John Gore was wearing three short chains of gold, each with a knot of pearls for a button. They were spaced out irregularly, those three strands of gold, as though one had been lost—perhaps torn off in a struggle and never been replaced. XI My lord paused abruptly with the wine-decanter in his hand, his eyes fixed in a vacant stare on his son, who was drawing a high-backed chair forward to the table. The rumble of the wheels of the coach that had brought them home from Hortense Mancini’s could be heard dying away along St. James’s. “Wine, Jack? They should have got Pembroke comfortably to bed by now. The man will be about again in a month—ready to quarrel with his best friend. What made you meddle in the game? A little mockery might do Nan Purcell’s girl some good.” John Gore was unfastening the curbs of his black cloak. His father watched him, his brows knitted into a sudden frown of uneasiness—the frown of a man surprised by a spasm of pain at the heart. “You all seemed so ready to make a fool of the child.” “Tut—tut, sir, you ought to have come by more shrewd sense than to make a pother over such a piece of fun. Where the devil, may I ask, did you get that cloak?” John Gore glanced down at the garment as though my lord’s tone of contempt might have made the thing shrivel on his shoulders. “The cloak? You should know it, since it came out of your own wardrobe!” “Mine! I deny the imputation.” He laughed with a cynical twist of the mouth, and regarded his son slyly over the rim of his wineglass. “Well, it came out of your room, sir!” “Come, come, Jack!” “My boy Sparkin fished it out of a chest when he was advising me on frills and fashions. The sobriety of the garment suited my inclinations.” Stephen Gore’s eyes gleamed for the moment with a flash of fierce impatience. “The meddlesome ape! You must pardon me being tickled by the irony of facts. Since Captain Jack Gore listens to a cook-boy’s opinions on costumes, I am mum.” The son seemed amused and piqued in turn by his father’s inquisitive and fanatical prejudices. He swung the cloak from his shoulders and held it up with one hand. “What have you to quarrel with, sir? The refinements of fashion are too deep for me. I shall be landed in Newgate for wearing the wrong kind of buckle on my shoes before the week is out.” My lord appeared in earnest. “Pshaw! Quarrel with? Why, the thing is about ten years out of date. Unpardonable! Give it up, Jack; I’ll not countenance you in such a pudding-cloth.” John Gore broke into a hearty, seafaring laugh.