Act I. Scene 1. The _Lady Harriet_ yawned. It was dull even at the

court of Queen Anne.

"Your Ladyship," said _Nancy_, her sprightly maid, "here are flowers from _Sir Tristan_."

"Their odour sickens me," was her ladyship's weary comment.

"And these diamonds!" urged _Nancy_, holding up a necklace for her mistress to view.

"They hurt my eyes," said her ladyship petulantly.

The simple fact is the _Lady Harriet_, like many others whose pleasures come so easily that they lack zest, was bored. Even the resourceful _Nancy_, a prize among maids, was at last driven to exclaim:

"If your ladyship only would fall in love!"

But herein, too, _Lady Harriet_ had the surfeit that creates indifference. She had bewitched every man at court only to remain unmoved by their protestations of passion. Even as _Nancy_ spoke, a footman announced the most persistent of her ladyship's suitors, _Sir Tristan of Mikleford_, an elderly cousin who presumed upon his relationship to ignore the rebuffs with which she met his suit. _Sir Tristan_ was a creature of court etiquette. His walk, his gesture, almost his speech itself were reduced to rule and method. The stiffness that came with age made his exaggerated manner the more ridiculous. In fact he was the incarnation of everything that the _Lady Harriet_ was beginning to find intolerably tedious.

"Most respected cousin, Lady in Waiting to Her Most Gracious Majesty," he began sententiously, and would have added all her titles had she not cut him short with an impatient gesture, "will your ladyship seek diversion by viewing the donkey races with me today?"

"I wonder," _Nancy_ whispered so that none but her mistress could hear, "if he is going to run in the races himself?" which evoked from the _Lady Harriet_ the first smile that had played around her lips that day. Seeing this and attributing it to her pleasure at his invitation _Sir Tristan_ sighed like a wheezy bellows and cast sentimental glances at her with his watery eyes. To stop this ridiculous exhibition of vanity her ladyship straightway sent him trotting about the room on various petty pretexts. "Fetch my fan, Sir!--Now my smelling salts--I feel a draught. Would you close the window, cousin? Ah, I stifle for want of air! Open it again!"

To these commands _Sir Tristan_ responded with as much alacrity as his stiff joints would permit, until _Nancy_ again whispered to her mistress, "See! He is running for the prize!"

Likely enough _Sir Tristan's_ fair cousin soon would have sent him on some errand that would have taken him out of her presence. But when he opened the window again, in came the strains of a merry chorus sung by fresh, happy voices of young women who, evidently, were walking along the highway. The _Lady Harriet's_ curiosity was piqued. Who were these women over whose lives ennui never seemed to have hung like a pall? _Nancy_ knew all about them. They were servants on the way to the Richmond fair to hire themselves out to the farmers, according to time-honoured custom.

The Richmond fair! To her ladyship's jaded senses it conveyed a suggestion of something new and frolicsome. "Nancy," she cried, carried away with the novelty of the idea, "let us go to the fair dressed as peasant girls and mingle with the crowd! Who knows, someone might want to hire us! I will call myself Martha, you can be Julia, and you, cousin, can drop your title for the nonce and go along with us as plain Bob!" And when _Sir Tristan_, shocked at the thought that a titled lady should be willing so to lower herself, to say nothing of the part he himself was asked to play, protested, she appealed to him with a feigned tenderness that soon won his consent to join them in their lark. Then to give him a foretaste of what was expected of him, they took him, each by an arm, and danced him about the room, shouting with mock admiration as he half slid, half stumbled, "Bravo! What grace! What agility!"

The _Lady Harriet_ actually was enjoying herself.