Prue drew on one of the gloves. It was so elastic, and yet so clinging, that it clasped her slender fingers like another skin, giving them even a more tapering and delicate appearance than usual. She did not open her letter until she was alone in her own room, and then, tearing off the cover with more eagerness than she would have cared to own, found nothing inside but ten crisp, new Bank of England notes for one hundred pounds each. She dropped them as though they had been so many adders, and a flush of anger rose to her cheek. "I suppose he has been waylaying and robbing some one!" she said half-aloud, "and hugs himself to think he can buy me with stolen money! Oh! he is just as base as the rest—" There was a movement in the other room, so Prue snatched up the bank-notes and crumpled them into her jewel-box. Not even to Peggie did she wish to confide this fresh instance of Robin’s turpitude. *CHAPTER XV* *THE RED DOMINO* Fashionable hours were early in the days of Queen Anne, and it was a well-known fact that the imperious Sarah Churchill did not easily pardon the slight of unpunctuality at her entertainments. So by nine o’clock the gorgeous drawing-rooms were well-filled and the steady stream of rank and beauty poured up the great staircase as fast as chariots and chairs could discharge their glittering loads. The sight was a dazzling one; every nationality, every celebrity was represented. Cardinals paid court to Gipsies, Charlemagne and Henry the Eighth contended for the favor of Helen of Troy, and in front of the dais upon which the duchess stood unmasked, to receive her guests, an endless procession passed, of monks and devils, kings and clowns, swashbucklers, nuns, fairies, princesses, allegorical and mythological personages—a veritable phantasmagoria, in which the mask and domino afforded just as much concealment as the wearer desired, but no more. A ripple of laughter or a murmur of admiration at frequent intervals announced the arrival of some specially brilliant or humorous masker, and when the crowd was at its densest, a couple approached the dais, followed by a stream of hilarious compliments. Foremost came Prue, dressed as a shepherdess. Over a skirt of her grandmother’s priceless lace, she wore a Watteau dress of white silk, brocaded with bunches of rosebuds and forget-me-nots, and coquettishly perched upon her luxuriant curls was a little straw hat, adorned with a wreath of roses and a flowing knot of blue ribbon. The pearl-embroidered gloves covered her hands, in one of which she carried a crook all laced with fluttering ribbons, and in the other a silken cord, by which she led Peggie, admirably disguised as a lamb; of gigantic growth, to be sure, but delightfully and gracefully grotesque as she ambled and pranced beside the little shepherdess, who at every other step, stopped to caress and encourage her.