A girl slight in figure but harmoniously proportioned had placed herself
about two yards from the bow window. She fixed her eyes on Gay and her
pretty mouth curved into a smile. Then she sang. The ditty was "Cold and
Raw," a ballad that two hundred years ago or so, never failed to delight
everybody from the highest to the lowest. She gave it with natural
feeling and without any attempt at display. The voice was untrained but
this did not matter. It was like the trill of a bird, sweet, flexible
and pure toned.

"A voice like that ought not to be battered about. It's meant for
something better than bawling to a mob. What says your lordship?"

Bolingbroke's face had become grave, almost stern. His high, somewhat
narrow, slightly retreating forehead, long nose and piercing eyes lent
themselves readily to severity. Twenty-five years before it was not so.
He was then the gayest of the gay and in the heyday of his career. Much
had happened since then. Disappointed political ambitions and political
flirtations with the Jacobite party had ended in exile in France, from
which, having been pardoned, he had not long returned.

Meeting Gay, the latter suggested a prowl in St. Giles, where life was
in more than its usual turmoil consequent upon the execution of Jack
Sheppard; so Viscount Bolingbroke revisited the slums of St. Giles,
which had been the scene of many an orgy in his hot youth.

The nobleman returned no answer to Gay's question. His thoughts had gone
back to his early manhood when he took his pleasure wherever he found
it. In some of his mad moods St. Giles was more to his taste than St.
James's. So long as the face was beautiful, and the tongue given to