"I don't want to think of the rascally knave or the rabble either. My thoughts are on yonder pretty little jade. Look for yourself, Bolingbroke. You're not so insensible to beauty as Lance Vane is at this moment." "Faith, I hope not. Where's the charmer?" said Bolingbroke walking to the window. "Stay. She's going to sing. She has the voice of a nightingale. I've heard her before. Lord! to think she has to do it for a living!" "Humph. She has courage. Most girls would die rather than rub shoulders with that frousy, bestial, drunken mob." "Aye, but that little witch subdues them all with her voice. What says Will Congreve? Music has charms to soothe a savage breast? Listen." A girl slight in figure but harmoniously proportioned had placed herself about two yards from the bow window. She fixed her eyes on Gay and her pretty mouth curved into a smile. Then she sang. The ditty was "Cold and Raw," a ballad that two hundred years ago or so, never failed to delight everybody from the highest to the lowest. She gave it with natural feeling and without any attempt at display. The voice was untrained but this did not matter. It was like the trill of a bird, sweet, flexible and pure toned. "A voice like that ought not to be battered about. It's meant for something better than bawling to a mob. What says your lordship?" Bolingbroke's face had become grave, almost stern. His high, somewhat narrow, slightly retreating forehead, long nose and piercing eyes lent themselves readily to severity. Twenty-five years before it was not so. He was then the gayest of the gay and in the heyday of his career. Much had happened since then. Disappointed political ambitions and political flirtations with the Jacobite party had ended in exile in France, from which, having been pardoned, he had not long returned. Meeting Gay, the latter suggested a prowl in St. Giles, where life was in more than its usual turmoil consequent upon the execution of Jack Sheppard; so Viscount Bolingbroke revisited the slums of St. Giles, which had been the scene of many an orgy in his hot youth. The nobleman returned no answer to Gay's question. His thoughts had gone back to his early manhood when he took his pleasure wherever he found it. In some of his mad moods St. Giles was more to his taste than St. James's. So long as the face was beautiful, and the tongue given to piquant raillery, any girl was good enough for him. He was of the time when a love intrigue was a necessary part of a man's life, and not infrequently of a woman's too.