Page:Marriott Watson--Galloping Dick.djvu/124

 point the door creaked and opened, and there came in softly a little old gentleman, dressed up very precious, and bedizened with fopperies.

Here, I must own, my heart was in my mouth upon this apparition, for we were like to have the tables turned upon our pretty plot, whoever the Devil he was. But her ladyship was never a whit dismayed.

“Ah!” she said joyously, running up to him, “you are come in the nick of time, Sir Charles. What think you? These rogues will make out that Sir Paul here is no husband of mine but a villain of a highwayman or some low fellow. Tell ’em, Sir Charles, tell ’em,” she says, clinging to him, “tell ’em to their faces. Is not this gentleman here Sir Paul, my husband, with whom I have gone to bed these five years?”

If Wilkins was took aback before, the little old gentleman was in even greater disconcert now. He dropped his cane, and next his snuffbox: then he started panting and wheezing, and his eyes bulged out of his sockets; and he grew a kind of purple. Faith, he went