his enamoured glances, but she did not choose to return them. She played
her part of the pretty young fellow who was a high-spirited beauty, with
more of wit and fire than she had ever played it before. The rollicking
hunting-squires, who had been her play-fellows so long, devoured her with
their delighted glances and roared with laughter at her sallies. Their
jokes and flatteries were not of the most seemly, but she had not been
bred to seemliness and modesty, and was no more ignorant than if she had
been, in sooth, some gay young springald of a lad. To her it was part of
the entertainment that upon this last night they conducted themselves as
beseemed her boyish masquerading. Though country-bred, she had lived
among companions who were men of the world and lived without restraints,
and she had so far learned from them that at fifteen years old she was as
worldly and as familiar with the devices of intrigue as she would be at
forty. So far she had not been pushed to practising them, her singular
life having thrown her among few of her own age, and those had chanced to
be of a sort she disdainfully counted as country bumpkins.

But the young gallant introduced to-night into the world she lived in was
no bumpkin, and was a dandy of the town. His name was Sir John Oxon, and
he had just come into his title and a pretty property. His hands were as
white and bejewelled as her own, his habit was of the latest fashionable
cut, and his fair flowing locks scattered a delicate French perfume she
did not even know the name of.

But though she observed all these attractions and found them powerful,
young Sir John remarked, with a slight sinking qualm, that her great eye
did not fall before his amorous glances, but met them with high smiling
readiness, and her colour never blanched or heightened a whit for all
their masterly skilfulness. But he had sworn to himself that he would
approach close enough to her to fire off some fine speech before the