I had been entertaining late that night, when his lordship entered unexpected. He came from St. James’s and from playing backgammon with the king, and wore his orders on a pearl-silk coat and, for contrast, a mighty scowling face over. I took no heed of him as he walked up the room towards me, humping his shoulders, and acknowledging wintrily the salutations of my little court, but went on laughing and rallying a dear little ensign Percy, with whom I was in love just then, _pour faire passer le temps_. However, the boy could not stand the inquisition of the red eyes, and joked himself into other company, with a blush and a bow to the ogre; at which I laughed, lolling back in my chair. “Well, madam,” said Hardrough, knuckling his snuff-box softly, “when you can vouchsafe me a moment of your attention.” I recognised the compelling tone in his voice, and rose, with a little show of indolence. “O!” I said, yawning, “what sin has found me out now? I vow it can never be so ugly as it looks.” He gave me his arm, mighty ceremonious, and, conducting me into an antechamber, shut the door. “That is for you to prove,” he said, taking snuff, and stood glaring into my soul. “So, madam,” he said, “you are for setting your little teeth into the hands that have warmed you?” I sat down, fluttering my fan, and pretty pale, I daresay. But I was not surprised. My conscience had pricked me at the first sight of his face. He pulled from his pocket a copy of the damning sheet, and “Tell me,” says he, “if His Majesty was justified in asking me if this did not refer to some member of my family?” I did not answer, and he threw the paper on the floor. “Well, you are condemned,” he said drily; and at that I found my wits. “Condemned?” I cried. “By whom? Why, my lord, how can you, being of the Court party and in Opposition, condemn an anti-papish tract?” “That is all very well,” he said acridly; “but the stone once set rolling against a house, who knows who may be included in the ruin?” I knew very well, of course, to what he referred; for had he not been subsidised by his sister (and during the time, too, when he had figured hottest against Catholic emancipation) into overlooking the establishment by her, in the very heart of his estate, of that community of Sisters whose complicity in my abduction I was bent upon exposing? And was I not aware, too, that the appointment he coveted to a vacant garter trembled at the moment in the balance of such revelations? O, I held some strings, my friend, you may believe! though at present I had the opposite to any inducement to pull this particular one. “Why, Nunky!” I cried, “is not this, your succour and protection of madam’s poor victim, the best proof of your orthodoxy?” He regarded me grimly, but with some shadow of returning good-humour. “That’s true enough,” he said, “so long as you use _me_, if at all, for no worse than to point the moral of _her_ damnation.” “Why should I not? ’Tis my interest to, at least.”