t.
There was no longer any chance of getting at the secret from Dorothy, if
secret there were. Whilst I am ruminating comes a great battling at
the street door, and Jack Comyn blew in like a gust of wind, rating me
soundly for being a lout and a blockhead.

"Zooks!" he cried, "I danced the soles off my shoes trying to get in
here yesterday, and I hear you were moping all the time, and paid me no
more attention than I had been a dog scratching at the door. What! and
have you fallen out with my lady?"

I confessed the whole matter to him. He was not to be resisted. He
called to Banks for a cogue of Nantsey, and swore amazingly at what he
was pleased to term the inscrutability of woman, offering up consolation
by the wholesale. The incident, he said, but strengthened his conviction
that Mr. Manners had appealed to Dorothy to save him. "And then," added
his Lordship, facing me with absolute fierceness, "and then, Richard,
why the devil did she weep? There were no tears when I made my avowal.
I tell you, man, that the whole thing points but the one way. She loves
you. I swear it by the rood."

I could not help laughing, and he stood looking at me with such a
whimsical expression that I rose and flung my arms around him.

"Jack, Jack!" I cried, "what a fraud you are! Do you remember the
argument you used when you had got me out of the sponging-house? Quoting
you, all I had to do was to put Dorothy to the proof, and she would toss
Mr. Marmaduke and his honour broadcast. Now I have confessed myself, and
what is the result? Nay, your theory is gone up in vapour."

"Then why," cried his Lordship, hotly, "why before refusing me did she
demand to know whether you had been in love with Patty Swain? 'Sdeath!
you put me in mind of a woman upon stilts--a man has always to be
walking alongside her with encouragement handy. And when a proud
creature such as our young lady breaks down as she hath done, 'tis
clear as skylight there is something wrong. And as for Mr. Manners, Hare
overheard a part of a pow-wow 'twixt him and the duke at the Bedford
Arms,--and Chartersea has all but owned in some of his drunken fits that
our little fop is in his power."

"Then she is in love with some one else," I said.

"I tell you she is not," said Comyn, still more emphatically; "and you
can write that down in red in your table book. Gossip has never been
able to connect her name with that of any man save yours, when she went
for you in Castle Yar