devouring woman's taste which was, to
have all the luxuries of the town in a framework of country scenery.

Gower Woodseer and he were dining together in the evening. The
circumstance was just endurable, but Gower would play the secretary,
and doggedly subjected him to hear a statement of the woeful plight of
Countess Livia's affairs. Gower, commissioned to examine them, remarked:
'If we have all the figures!'

'If we could stop the bleeding!' Fleetwood replied. 'Come to the Opera
to-night; I promised. I promised Abrane for to-morrow. There's no end to
it. This gambling mania's a flux. Not one of them except your old enemy,
Corby, keeps clear of it; and they're at him for subsidies, as they are
at me, and would be at you or any passenger on the suspected of a purse.
Corby shines among them.'

That was heavy judgement enough, Gower thought. No allusion to Esslemont
ensued. The earl ate sparely, and silently for the most part.

He was warmed a little at the Opera by hearing Henrietta's honest
raptures over her Columelli in the Pirata. But Lord Brailstone sat
behind her, and their exchange of ecstasies upon the tattered pathos of

E il mio tradito amor,

was not moderately offensive.

His countenance in Henrietta's presence had to be studied and
interpreted by Livia. Why did it darken? The demurest of fuliginous
intriguers argued that Brail stone was but doing the spiriting required
of him, and would have to pay the penalty unrewarded, let him Italianize
as much as he pleased. Not many months longer, and there would be
the bit of an outburst, the whiff of scandal, perhaps a shot, and the
rupture of an improvident alliance, followed by Henrietta's free hand to
the moody young earl, who would then have possession of the only woman
he could ever love: and at no cost. Jealousy of a man like Brailstone,
however infatuated the man, was too foolish. He must perceive how
matters were tending? The die-away acid eyeballs-at-the-ceiling of a
pair of fanatics per la musica might irritate a husband, but the lover
should read and know. Giddy as the beautiful creature deprived of her
natural aliment seems in her excuseable hunger for it, she has learnt
her lesson, she is not a reeling libertine.

Brailstone peered through his eyelashes at the same shadow of a frown
where no frown sat on his friend's brows. Displeasure was manifest, and
why? Fleetwood had given him the dispossessing shrug of the man out of
the run, and