“Very well!” said her ladyship, rising, and drawing her pelisse about her again, and buttoning it at the throat. Her eyes ran over her niece; she smiled, and held out a gloved hand. “Au revoir, then! I am putting up at the Clarendon. You will take a hackney coach, and join me there tomorrow: it is understood? Good! Now, do you think that Joe, or Mr Nidd, or even one of the nephews, could procure me a hack?”

“Yes, ma’am, on the instant!” replied Kate, starting up from her chair, and running to the door. “Only wait, I do implore you!”

Pausing merely to cram a hat over her dusky locks, and to huddle a cloak about her person, she darted down the stairs, and out into the yard, to be pulled up in her tracks by Mr Nidd, who, from his vantage point on the balcony, saw her, and briskly commanded her to stop. Rising, not without difficulty, from his seat, he adjured her not to be a hoyden, but to come back into the house this instant. “A’h, know!” he said. “Going to summon a hack, ain’t you? Well, you won’t, see? You’ll leave that to them as is better able than you to do it, my girl! Back with you into the house, miss! And take that nasty hat off your head!”

“It is not a nasty hat!” retorted Kate indignantly.

But, as Mr Nidd had dived through a doorway out of sight, this reply fell on the ambient air; and a few minutes later Old Tom came grumbling out of the stables, and hobbled across the yard to the gateway.

“Oh, Tom!” uttered Kate, in remorseful accents.

“You let him be!” said Mr Nidd, emerging from the stables behind him. “Joe and Jos and Ted being gone off with loads, there ain’t nobody but that gormless hunk, Will, in the stables, and likely he’d come back with the oldest hack in the rank. You get back up them stairs, missy, and go on gabbing to her ladyship!”