Lavendale accompanied her swift footsteps out into the portico. Sedan-chairs were standing in quadruple ranks, coaches and chariots blocked the road, shining meteoric with the blaze of their lamps and the glitter of their harness, horses champing, snorting, pawing, in impatience to be moving through the cold crisp air. There was a slight frost, a faint gray fog, and, above, a new moon rode fast in a sky of steely blue, broken by dark clouds. "I hate to be smothered in a chair after escaping from a stifling assembly-room," said Lady Judith, "and the night seems positively enchanting. Would you have the courage to walk home with me?" "It needs the courage of a lion, yet I will face the peril for the sake of such company. But will those dainty little Turkish slippers which I observed just now keep out the cold and damp?" "O, they are more substantial than they look, and the stones seem quite dry. I am not afraid. Juba, tell my chairmen I am going to walk." Juba, Lady Judith's particular personal attendant, was quick to marshal his men. Two went in advance of their mistress with blazing torches, two others followed, while Juba marched at the head of the little procession by way of advanced guard. Thus attended, and leaning upon Lord Lavendale's arm, Lady Judith's progress by way of Gerard Street to Soho Square had a picturesque air which is unknown in our matter-of-fact age of well-lit streets and miniature broughams. Everything in those days was on a grandiose scale; and if people spent a good deal of money, they at least had their full value in show and glitter. Those running footmen with their flaming torches, that huge blackamoor with his splendid livery, made a display that would have graced the semi-Oriental state of a Roman Empress in the decadence of the Empire. Gerard Street was alive with gaiety and fashion--beaux and belles arriving and departing, torches flaming, harness rattling, sedans setting down or taking up their freight at every door, footmen lounging against every railing, link-boys rushing to and fro, making believe that the night was dark, though the cold crescent moon kept peeping out from amidst those black scurrying clouds and putting those resin-dropping links to shame. Windows blazed with the light of many candles, and shadows flitted across many a blind. From some houses there came a gust of noise--laughter, babble, and the rattle of dice; from another, sounds of music now classic, then modern and fashionable. There was no such thing as solitude for Lavendale and Lady Judith in that walk through one of the most fashionable quarters of the town, no possibility of anything compromising or sentimental. Their talk was of the lightest--the very thistledown of polite conversation--with no more purpose or depth of meaning than there is in Mr. Pope's letters to Lady Mary written a few years before this time.