She played her part of the pretty young fellow who was a high-spirited beauty, with more of wit and fire than she had ever played it before.

The rollicking hunting-squires, who had been her play-fellows so long, devoured her with their delighted glances and roared with laughter at her sallies.

Their jokes and flatteries were not of the most seemly, but she had not been bred to seemliness and modesty, and was no more ignorant than if she had been, in sooth, some gay young springald of a lad.

To her it was part of the entertainment that upon this last night they conducted themselves as beseemed her boyish masquerading.

Though country-bred, she had lived among companions who were men of the world and lived without restraints, and she had so far learned from them that at fifteen years old she was as worldly and as familiar with the devices of intrigue as she would be at forty.