perplexity.

"How about his honour with whom you supped at Windsor? how about the
landlord you spun by the neck? You should have heard the company laugh
when Horry told us that! And Miss Dolly cried out that she was sure it
must be Richard, and none other. Is it not so, Miss Manners?"

"Really, my Lord, I can't remember," replied Dolly, looking out of the
coach window. "Who put those frightful skulls upon Temple Bar?"

Then the mystery of their coming was clear to me, and the superior
gentleman at the Castle Inn had been the fashionable dabbler in arts and
letters and architecture of Strawberry Hill, of whom I remembered having
heard Dr. Courtenay speak, Horace Walpole. But I was then far too
concerned about Dorothy to listen to more. Her face was still turned
away from me, and she was silent. I could have cut out my tongue for my
blunder. Presently, when we were nearly out of the Strand, she turned
upon me abruptly.

"We have not yet heard, Richard," she said, "how you got into such a
predicament."

"Indeed, I don't know myself, Dolly. Some scoundrel bribed the captain
of the slaver. For I take it Mr. Walpole has told you I was carried off
on a slaver, if he recalled that much of the story."

"I don't mean that," answered Dolly, impatiently. "There is something
strange about all this. How is it that you were in prison?"

"Mr. Dix, my grandfather's agent, took me for an impostor and would