"How delightful! the very hour for ghosts, and this dark walk would lend itself to the habits of phantoms. Would we could meet some gentle spirit!" "You had better come to the King's Head, where the supper-table might tempt even a ghost to become again mortal. There can be no gentler spirit than champagne cooled with ice after the new mode. They are all dying of hunger, and sent me to hunt for you. I was to bring you to them alive or dead. I doubt if they cared which. Hunger is so horribly selfish." "I had no idea it was so late. The nightingales and Lord Lavendale's witty discourse have beguiled me into forgetfulness." They hurried to that gayer part of the gardens where the arbours sparkled with wax candles and jewels and beauty, and where the air was musical with laughter. All yonder had been silence and shadow: all here was rattle and animation. Supper had begun at the King's Head, on Mr. Topsparkle's insistance that they should wait no longer for his wife. Lavendale and Lady Judith carried the matter off so lightly that there seemed no room for scandal; but that keen observer, Tom Philter, noted some ugly twitchings of Mr. Topsparkle's mouth and eyebrows. Some airy shafts Lady Judith could not escape. "What a glorious thing is a spotless reputation!" cried Lady Polwhele, radiant and loquacious after her first half-bottle of champagne. "Had it been Asterley and I, now, who had lost ourselves for an hour in those dark walks where the nightingales sing so sweetly, people would have been ever so ill-natured about us: but Lady Judith is like Diana, her name stands for chastity. Even Lavendale's ill-repute cannot damage her. How fares it with you and your Surrey heiress, by the bye, Lavendale?" "Off, madam, done with like the old worn-out moons that doubtless go to some rubbish-heap in the sky. She would have none of me." "She was a foolish girl. She might do worse than marry an agreeable reprobate like you. I swear reprobates are the pleasantest beings on this earth. They flatter one's _amour propre_. One never need feel ashamed before them. Fill me another brimmer, Asterley," said the Dowager, holding out her glass, and leaning across the table with a freedom of attitude which accentuated that absence of tucker whereof the _Guardian_ had discoursed in mild reproof a dozen years before. That sly humourist and gentle moralist, Joseph Addison, had vanished from this earthly scene, and the tucker or modesty-piece, as he had called it, was not reinstated; nor had either the manners or the morals of fashionable beauty improved since the moralist's time.