"I have a favour to ask you, my Lord Dover. I wish Will Hardres here," the nobleman bowed, "to lead the minuet with my daughter. We Fleets think it the greatest honour in the world to fight the French in a King's ship; and Will is to have the special honour of sailing with Admiral Nelson--a greater man, to my mind, than St. Vincent, or Hood, or Howe." "As you please," said the Marquess, in such a chilling way that Will, as he said, could have killed him, and I know the kind of light which came into Katherine's eyes. "I cannot take my Lord Marquess's place," said Will. "Then, by G--d, you shall take my daughter herself, if she'll have you," said Lord Eastry, more thoroughly roused and vexed with himself for the slight he had put upon the Marquess. "By G--d, he shall, if he'll have me," said Katherine, also roused, and using her father's not very elegant language. Poor Will, the very pattern of good manners, which were well nigh all that his widowed mother had to bestow upon him, was dumfounded. In a moment of pique Katherine and her father had bestowed her hand upon him--that which he coveted more than anything else in the world, and dared not covet; and the bestowal had been made in a manner and language so extraordinary that he was at a loss how to effect the acceptance. For the moment the Marquess came to the rescue. "I think I am to have the honour--for the minuet." It was not natural to Katherine not to be gracious; and she had months of remembered kindnesses to this man's credit. Indeed she had come within an ace of thinking of him as her husband. So she accepted the situation with womanly tact, she afterwards maintaining that she spoke as little as she might. She danced the minuet with grave sweetness and gentleness, which, in a mischievous girl like Katherine, who was little more than a child, was, in itself, an ominous sign for the Marquess. She also cast from time to time a tender glance, a speaking smile, to Will. "It seems to me," said his lordship, bitterly--he could not be chilling to Katherine, who had his heart--"that you are stepping with me, and dancing with that boy." "I am but lately affianced to him, my lord," retorted Katherine, this time with mischief in her eyes. "You don't mean to say that you're taking this tomfoolery seriously, Lady Katherine--Kitty?" "It is no tomfoolery to me, my lord," she said, with a flash of rising anger that warned him. "I had kissed him my love, before you nettled my father into giving me the leave he might never have given otherwise." By this time the minuet was over, and Katherine had suffered herself to be led into one of the aisles of the barn which had been rigged into a ball-room.