ire--aye, and of
Worcestershire and Warwickshire to boot. That may stir his
liquor-sodden brain and set him thinking."

"How--will _she_ bear it?" asked his Lordship of Dunstanwolde. "Will
not her spirit take fire that she should be so reproved?"

"'Twill take fire enough, doubtless--and be damned to it!" replied my
Lord Twemlow, hotly. "She will rage and rap out oaths like a trooper,
but if Jeof Wildairs is the man he used to be, he will make her obey
him, if he chooses--or he will break her back."

"'Twould be an awful battle," said Roxholm, "between a will like hers
and such a brute as he, should her choice not be his."

"Ay, he is a great blackguard," commented Twemlow, coolly enough.
"England scarcely holds a bigger than Jeoffry Wildairs, and he has had
the building of her, body and soul."

'Twas not alone my Lord Twemlow who talked of her, but almost every
other person, so it seemed. Oftenest she was railed at and condemned,
the more especially if there were women in the party discussing her;
but 'twas to be marked that at such times as men were congregated and
talked of her faults and beauties, more was said of her charms than her
sins. They fell into relating their stories of her, even the soberest
of them, as if with a sense of humour in them, as indeed the point of
such anecdotes was generally humorous because of a certain piquant
boldness and lawless wild spirit shown in them. The story of the
Chaplain, Roxholm heard again, and many others as fantastic. The
retorts of this young female Ishmael upon her detractors and assailers,
on such rare occasions as she encountered them, were full of a wit so
biting and so keen that they were more than any dared to face when it
could be avoided. But she was so bold and ingenious, and so ready with
devices, that few could escape her. Her companionship with her father's
cronies had given her a curious knowledge of the adventures which took
place in three counties, at least, and her brain was so alert and her
memory so unusual that she was enabled to confront an enemy with such
adroitly arranged circumstantial evidence that more than one poor
beauty would far rather have faced a loaded cannon than found herself
within the immediate neighbourhood of the mocking and flashing eyes.
Her meeting in the mercer's shop with the fair "Willow Wand," Lady
Maddon, had been so full of spirited and pungent truth as to drive her
ladyship back to London after her two hours' fainting