Light dawned on Bettison. This was the man who had rescued Diana, confound his impudence!
"Ah, yes, sir! Your arm, was it not? My faith, I should be proud of such a wound!"
It seemed to Carstares that he smiled at Diana in a damned familiar fashion, devil take his impudence!
"It was indeed a great honour, sir. Mistress Di, I have finished sorting your green silks."
Diana sank down on the cushion again, and shook some more strands out on to his knee.
"How quick you have been! Now we will do the blue ones."
Bettison glared. This fellow seemed prodigious intimate with Diana, devil take him! He sat down beside Miss Betty, and addressed my lord patronisingly.
"Let me see-er-Mr. Carr. Have I met you in town, I wonder? At Tom's, perhaps?"
This country bumpkin would belong to Tom's, reflected John savagely, for no reason at all. Aloud he said: "I think it extremely unlikely, sir. I have been abroad some years."
"Oh, indeed, sir? The 'grand tour,' I suppose?"
Mr. Bettison's tone was not the tone of one who supposes any such thing.
John smiled.
"Not this time," he said, "that was seven years ago."
Mr. Bettison had heard rumours of this fellow who, it was murmured, was nought but a common highwayman.
"Really? After Cambridge, perhaps?"
"Oxford," corrected Carstares gently.
Curse his audacity! thought Mr. Bettison.
"Seven years ago-let me think. George must have been on the tour then-Selwyn, I mean, Miss Beauleigh."
Jack, who had made the tour with several other young bucks fresh down from college, accompanied as far as Paris by the famous wit himself, held his peace.
Mr. Bettison then launched forth into anecdotes of his own tour, and seeing that his friend was entirely engrossed with Miss Diana and her silks, O'Hara felt it incumbent on him to draw the enemy's fire, and, taking his own departure, to bear the squire off with him. For which he received a grateful smile from my lord, and a kiss blown from the tips of her fingers from Mistress Di, with whom he was on the best of terms.