aught
Chloe in their arms to kiss her, rendering it natural for their
cavaliers to exclaim that Chloe was blest above mortals. The duchess
preferred to walk. Her spirits were excited, and her language smelt of
her origin, but the superb fleshly beauty of the woman was aglow, and
crying, 'I declare I should burst in one of those boxes--just as if
you'd stalled me!' she fanned a wind on her face, and sumptuously spread
her spherical skirts, attended by the vanquished and captive Colonel
Poltermore, a gentleman manifestly bent on insinuating sly slips of
speech to serve for here a pinch of powder, there a match. 'Am I?' she
was heard to say. She blew prodigious deep-chested sighs of a coquette
that has taken to roaring.

Presently her voice tossed out: 'As if I would!' These vivid
illuminations of the Colonel's proceedings were a pasture to the
rearward groups, composed of two very grand ladies, Caseldy, Mr.
Beamish, a lord, and Chloe.

'You man! Oh!' sprang from the duchess. 'What do I hear? I won't listen;
I can't, I mustn't, I oughtn't.'

So she said, but her head careened, she gave him her coy reluctant ear,
with total abandonment to the seductions of his whispers, and the lord
let fly a peal of laughter. It had been a supper of copious wine, and
the songs which rise from wine. Nature was excused by our midnight
naturalists.

The two great dames, admonished by the violence of the nobleman's
laughter, laid claim on Mr. Beamish to accompany them at their parting
with Chloe and Duchess Susan.

In the momentary shuffling of couples incident to adieux among a
company, the duchess murmured to Caseldy:

'Have I done it well.'

He praised her for perfection in her acting. 'I am at your door at
three, remember.'

'My heart's in my mouth,' said she.

Colonel Poltermore still had the privilege of conducting her the few
farther steps to her lodgings.

Caseldy walked beside Chloe, and silently, until he said, 'If I have not
yet mentioned the subject--'

'If it is an allusion to money let me not hear it to-night,' she
replied.

'I can only say that my lawyers have instructions. But my lawyers cannot
pay you in gratitude. Do not think me in your hardest review of my
misconduct ungrateful. I have ever esteemed you above all women; I do,
and I shall; you are too much above me. I am afraid I am a composition
of bad stuff; I did not win a very particularly good name on the
Continent; I begin to know myself, and in compa