“A gentleman’s lady”! My lord grinned, then looked serious. “Did she give no name?” “The name of Davis, please your lordship. Mrs. Moll Davis she called herself.” Chesterfield’s brow went up; he whistled. Of course, now, he remembered, this must be Kate’s young country friend of whom he had been advised, and her manners, no doubt, were to be accounted to mere rustic gaucherie. He had better see her at once in his wife’s absence, and judge of her suitability, from his point of view, for the part for which Hamilton had cast her. She might prove, after all, an impossible instrument to play on. And yet the rogue had seemed confident. He turned on the porter harshly. “Why did you not say so before? Mrs. Davis is her ladyship’s friend and guest, and as such is to be lodged fitly. See to it, fellow, and that you keep that free tongue of yours out of your cheek.” He went on, and at the door of the audience chamber was received by a couple of lackeys, who, throwing wide the oak, announced him in form-- “My lord Chesterfield, for Mrs. Davis!” She had been peering into costly nooks and corners, and was taken by surprise. But that did not matter. The blush with which she whisked about from contemplating herself in a remote stand-glass became her mightily, and seemed offered to his lordship like a flower gathered from the mirror to propitiate him for the liberty she had been caught taking. He accepted and pinned it over his heart, so to speak. If this was rusticity, he was quite willing, it appeared to him, to become a country Strephon on the spot. The danger, he foresaw at once, was of falling in love with his own pretence. And, indeed, Mrs. Davis, with her pert young face and forget-me-not eyes, made an alluring figure, and one seeming admirably efficient to the part she was dressed to play. As to that, Hamilton had advised with taste and discretion; so that, in her plain bodice and pannier, with her slim arms bared to the elbow and tied above with favours of ribbon, and the curls shaken over her bright cheeks from under a coquettish hat-brim, she might have passed for the very sweet moral of a provincial nymph, conceived in the happiest vein between homeliness and fashion. She curtsied, as she had been taught to curtsey on the stage--latterly, for her sex had only quite recently won its way to the footlights--and boldly, with a little musical laugh, accepted the situation. “Sure,” she said, “if you hadn’t caught me at it, my cheeks ’ud betray me. I was looking in the glass--so there!” It put him at his ease at once. With no rustic coyness to conquer, he was already half way to the end. It mattered little, he felt confident, what he might venture to say; and so he gave his tongue full rein. “So there!” said he; “and faith, Mistress Davis, if I were you, I could look till my eyes went blind.”