Now Molly Lafone knew how to play such an one as Denis Kilcroney, as a skilful angler plays a fish. She had hooked him with that glance of innocent joy: now she drove the crochets in more firmly by an air of flutter which would have melted any masculine temperament. (“Oh, I have betrayed myself,” her tremor, her shy butterfly glance, her sigh, her shaken laughter proclaimed.) “Oh, the Royal orb,” she murmured. “Oh, my Lord!” Then, “Aye, true, indeed. Oh, as you say! The orb and sceptre. George----” here a gleam of mischief came like April sunshine to drive the shadows from her pretty, abashed countenance. Her faltering voice took a saucy note. “George and his Dragon,” she whispered, tittered, put her finger to her lip. “Oh, the mortal dullness of it! I’m a Parson’s daughter, as your Lordship knows, and brought up prodigious proper, but I vow and declare that if anything could make me wish--want to shake off my sense of piety and virtue--what am I saying? Good heavens, my Lord Kilcroney! You are but just arrived; but if Windsor is pompous and dull, Weymouth is--Oh!” she yawned. Kilcroney was eyeing her, his sides shaking with mirth, but at the words pompous the laughter left his lips, he scratched his chin. “Well, now that you mention it, my dear,” he murmured, “it struck me there was a certain tedium in the air.” “Oh, tedium!” cried Molly, and went off on another yawn. As she yawned, he reflected. Pompous, she had said. There had distinctly been a shade of pomposity about his Kitty, as, just landed from the coach, he had hurried to embrace her, scarce eighteen hours ago. “Heavens, Denis, not in full view of the window. The Princesses are fond of an evening walk. And good gracious, my Lord, what a coat to travel in, and the King’s gentlemen always point-device! And pray, dear Denis, let me send for the hairdresser, for if Her Majesty was to see you, such a show, down the parade, and she so set against the Irish, I scarcely know how I could bear myself in her Presence.” This was the welcome Denis had had the day before; and it had somewhat clouded his morning thought. It had taken all the comfort of his recent passage through the hands of a first-class barber, and of as good a tankard of burnt Sherry as ever he had tasted at the County Club, to restore him to the good humour in which Mistress Lafone had found him. He now thought back upon his grievance, and as is often the case, with an increased sense of injury. “’Pon me soul, you’re in the right of it! And what in the world my Lady and the rest of them want to be hanging on the Court for, this way, passes me. Glory be to God, doesn’t weariness ooze out of them all? It’s sodden they are with it.”