'Leedies on a party of pleasure?' he jeered. 'Faix, Miss Doreen, ye're fond of singing-birds. I'd bring ye insoide, but 'tisn't clean enough. 'Deed it's not, now. I'll have it swept to-morrow. Is it Councillor Crosbie ye're afther trying to peep at? I wouldn't, if I were you, for he's not the purty boy at whom ye used to lower your eyelids.' Doreen replied with studied calmness: 'You do well to drop disguise, Mr. Cassidy, since I know you as you are. If they are in your care, God help them!' The marble beauty! Her scorn ate into his flesh like vitriol. He had, with long patience, shown a fictitious better side to her in vain. It was with fiendish pleasure that he exposed the real one. But the contempt which knitted the maiden's brow and distended her finely-cut nostrils proved too much for the giant's pot-valour. He tried to wink with the slyness which used to keep supper-tables in a roar, but shrank under her steady glance, and retiring with a growl, discomfited, slammed the door. Then, the spell removed, cursing himself and her, he went through a pantomime of anathema, battering the panels from within with heavy fists till the turnkeys ran out, supposing him to have been attacked. 'She treats me like dirt!' he gnashed out between foul oaths. 'Yet, plaze the Lord, I'll brand myself on her memory till her dying day. Damn her! A fight, is it? A fight be it--deadly--to the last gasp. We'll see if her ladyship will be so hoity-toity then!' The frown passed not from the maiden's face with the vanishing of Cassidy. _He_ there, in apparent authority! His presence boded little good to either of the dear prisoners. What a queer character was Cassidy's! Outwardly merry and good-humoured, he was by nature coldly fierce, calculating, callous. Reckless of life himself, its value to others made no impression on him. Playful and unpitying, commanding the smile and heeding not the sigh, he was a human paradox. The more Doreen considered him the less could she understand such a person, being herself true and impulsive and open as the day. 'We will go to Ely Place at once,' she said hurriedly. 'Lord Clare must and shall help us.'