“Bully!” he cried; “I’ll lay you fifty guineas that Mr. Carvel gets the Beauty, against Chartersea.”

This roused me.

“Nay, Mr. Fox, I beg of you,” I protested, with all the vehemence I could muster.  “Miss Manners must not be writ down in such a way.”

For answer he snapped his fingers at the drowsy Brooks, who brought the betting book.

“There!” says he; “and there, and there,” turning over the pages; “her name adorns a dozen leaves, my fine buckskin.  And it will be well to have some truth about her.  Enter the wager, Brooks.”

“Hold!” shouts Bolingbroke; “I haven’t accepted.”

You may be sure I was in an agony over this desecration, which I was so powerless to prevent.  But as I was thanking my stars that the matter had blown over with Bolingbroke’s rejection, there occurred a most singular thing.

The figure on the lounge, with vast difficulty, sat up.  To our amazement we beheld the bloated face of the Duke of Chartersea staring stupidly.

“Damme, Bully, you refushe bet like tha’!” he said.  “I’ll take doshen of ’em-doshen, egad.  Gimme the book, Brooksh.  Cursh Fox—­lay thousand d—­d provinshial never getsh ’er—­I know—­”

I sat very still, seized with a loathing beyond my power to describe to thick that this was the man Mr. Manners was forcing her to marry.  Fox laughed.

“Help his Grace to his coach,” he said to two of the footmen.

“Kill fellow firsht!” cried his Grace, with his hand on his sword, and instantly fell over, and went sound asleep.

“His Grace has sent his coach home, your honour,” said one of the men, respectfully.  “The duke is very quarrelsome, sir.”

“Put him in a chair, then,” said Charles.

So they fearfully lifted his Grace, who was too far gone to resist, and carried him to a chair.  And Mr. Fox bribed the chairmen with two guineas apiece, which he borrowed from me, to set his Grace down amongst the marketwomen at Covent Garden.

The next morning Banks found in my pockets something over seven hundred pounds more than I had had the day before.

I rose late, my head swimming with mains and nicks, and combinations of all the numbers under the dozen; debated whether or no I would go to Arlington Street, and decided that I had not the courage.  Comyn settled it by coming in his cabriolet, proposed that we should get the air in the park, dine at the Cocoa Tree, and go afterwards to Lady Tankerville’s drum-major, where Dolly would undoubtedly be.

“Now you are here, Richard,” said his Lordship, with his accustomed bluntness, “and your sea-captain has relieved your Quixotic conscience, what the deuce do you intend to do?

“Win a thousand pounds every night at Brooks’s, or improve your time and do your duty, and get Miss Manners out of his Grace’s clutches?  I’ll warrant something will come of that matter this morning.”