Where she was going, she knew not. Where she was, she had no smallest idea when, as the sun looked over the long low line of horizon before her, she with a shudder beheld a gibbet outlined against the morning sky. The black gave a lunge that knocked her feet out of the stirrups (quick in again), reared, whinnied like a devil, and, nose to ground, now made her rider understand that up to the present she had done nothing much in the way of speed, or of efforts at emptying the saddle. Yet Her Ladyship stuck on, with flying colors, too, and no loss of either wig, hat, weapon or will, and with grateful heart she now found herself being spun across a magnificent park, where the deer fled before her, it is true, but at the upper end of which she saw looming the turrets and towers of a fine castle. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] XI _Wherein Lady Peggy is condemned to be hanged, and sets forth, attended by the clergy, for the gallows._ Although Sir Percy had cheerfully foretold for Kennaston the roseate picture of Lady Diana’s “Yes” crowning the young poet’s somewhat diffident suit with untold happiness, the fact was quite other. Her Ladyship, on the day of Mr. Brummell’s party to Ivy Dene, having overheard the Honorable Dolly Tarleton, in the library, laying six to four to Lady Biddy O’Toole, that their host’s daughter was “only waiting for the beautiful young poet’s asking, to jump into his arms immediately,” did, with such sudden change of demeanor from sweets to sours, languishing eyes to averted looks, smiles to pouts, corner chats to open flouts, put her lover into a state of mind, the like of which he presently described, as only he could, in a copy of verses, which the next night at White’s were pronounced to be, indeed, “the masterpiece of one whose heart pants, whose whole being’s but at the beck and call of her who wears a smocked petticoat, ogles with a witching eye, and should be vain that so much genius lays itself at her feet, to wit, Lady D——a W——n.” For, taking immediate fright at his Lady’s coldness, Kennaston had ordered a post-chaise from the Brookwood Arms, and without a word of farewell to Lady Diana, save that embodied in an ode, “To Chloe When Unkind,” which her woman found pinned to Her Ladyship’s cloak when she was putting it on her shoulders the following morning, had gone to town, and just in time at the White Horse to be haled into Mr. Brummell’s party for breakfast, and to learn of the adventure with Tom Kidde, the valor of Sir Robin McTart, and the absence of that young gentleman, as also Sir Percy, from the board.