a furious look of suspiciously jealous rage.

Lady Lisle saw in all this a means of making a counter attack upon her
husband's desperate assault, and she seized upon the weapon proffered by
fate at once.

"Don't add insult to injury before these friends of yours, sir," she
cried, fully equipped now for the counter attack; "and pray do not
imagine that you have blinded me by this contemptible dust you are
trying to throw in my eyes."

"Dust, madam?" cried Sir Hilton, some what staggered by the reaction
that had taken place.

"Yes, sir--dust. You forget that I was a witness to your appearance in
that den of infamy."

"Den of infamy, madam?"

"Yes, sir; den of infamy--disgracefully inebriated."

"Oh, poor old Hilton!" whispered Granton. "I must--"

"Silence!" cried Lady Lisle, turning upon the speaker, in the tones and
with the air of a tragedy queen, her eyes flashing again as she saw a
peculiar movement beneath the Polar bear skin, from the bottom of which
there was the sudden protrusion of a very prettily-booted little foot.

"Yes, Sir Hilton," continued Lady Lisle, pressing her hands upon her
heaving bosom to keep down the seething passion. "I repeat,
disgracefully inebriated, dressed in the low, flaunting guise of a
jockey."

"Oh, dear," groaned Sir Hilton, completely taken aback.

"And forgetting the wife who rescued you from ruin--home--position--even
yourself, as a man bearing an honoured title in the country, stooping to
toy and play with that--abandoned creature."

"What!"

"Whom you have had the audacity to bring with you into this--my house."

"My dear madam!" cried Lady Tilborough, indignantly.

"Silence, woman!" shouted the furious wife. "Do you think me blind?
Did I not see you and your confederate plotting together just now to try
and hide his shame?"

"No," cried Granton; "nothing of the kind."

"Laura!" roared Sir Hilton. "You must be mad!"

"Mad? Ha, ha!" cried Lady Lisle, hysterically, and covering three yards
in a gliding rush that would have been a triumph upon the stage she
seized the Polar bear skin with both hands, whisked it off, and
displayed the sleeping figure of poor little Molly, flushed,
dishevelled, not to say touzled, by the heavy covering from which she
had been freed, and just aroused sufficiently to open a pair of pretty
red lips and say drowsily--

"Kiss me, dear."

"Ha!" ejaculated Lady Lisle, with her eyes darting daggers, and her
fingers playing inst