Page:The Story of Nell Gwyn.djvu/42

26 real pleasure of the play, however, was that he sat by the side of "pretty witty Nell," whose foot has been described as the least of any woman's in England, and to Rebecca Marshall, whose handsome hand he has carefully noted in another entry in his Diary. The small feet peeping occasionally from beneath a petticoat, and the handsome hands raised now and then to check a vagrant curl, must have held the Clerk of the Acts in a continual state of torture.

There was a novelty that night which had doubtless drawn Nell and old Stephen Marshall's younger daughter to the pit of Lincoln's Inn Fields. Mrs. Betterton was playing Roxolana in place of the elder Davenport, and Moll Davis had begun to attract the notice of some of the courtiers, and, as it was whispered, of the King himself. The old Roxolana had become the mistress of the twentieth and last earl of the great race of Vere; and Nell, while she reflected on what she may have thought to have been the good fortune of her fellow actress—might have had her envy appeased could she have foreseen that she should give birth to a son (the mother an orange-girl, the father the King of England), destined to obtain a dukedom in her own