rty of the dabe of Miss More--is she sdaying in this house?" asks
Moss, half pushing his way in, and trying to look impudent. You should
have seen the butler's face when he answered him.

"Who the devil are you?" he asked, "and what do you mean by coming here
like this? Outside, my man, or I'll put you there pretty quick."

He took Moss by the collar, and, turning him about as though he were a
babe, shoved him on the wrong side of the door before you could have
said "knife." Then he turned to the sergeant.

"What's all this, Sergeant Joyce?" he asked. "Why do you bring this
person here?"

"Oh," stammered the sergeant, "he says that a certain Miss More----"

"I beg you pardon," cried the butler quickly, "I think you should speak
of Lady Badington--my master left for Paris at eight o'clock this
morning."

"What!" roared Moss--and you could have heard him on the Goodwin
Sands--"Lord Badington's married her?"

"I believe those are the facts," says Hill, very quietly--and
then--well, and then I sat down on the doorstep and I laughed until the
tears ran down my face. Oh, Lord! oh, Lord!--and Moss's face! But you
will understand all that, and how the sergeant looked, and the smile on
the butler's face, without me saying a single word about it.

"Take a week's notice, and be d----d to you!" cried I, turning upon my
master all of a sudden. "Do you think I'll serve with a man who sent
policemen after his best customers? You go to hell, Moss--where you
ought to have been long ago," and with that I just walked off down the
drive, and Biggs with me. Lord, what an afternoon we had! And the
night we spent afterwards in Ramsgate!

For, you see, it was quite true. Old Lord Badington, who never could
look at a pretty woman twice without falling in love with her, found
himself mostly alone with Mistress Dolly at Sandwich, and, by all that
is true and wonderful, he married her.

Not that she was Dolly St. John at all, you must know, but Dolly
Hamilton in reality; and connected, I am told, with the old American
family, the Hamiltons of Philadelphia. What she did in London was
done, I do believe, for the sheer excitement of doing it. And if folks
have called her an adventuress, set that down to the rogues of
trustees, who played ducks and drakes with her fortune, and left her in
Europe to shift as best she might.

I got a hundred pounds for that job, sent by Miss Dolly herself from
Venice. Moss got his car back, an