crets--and she had confided everything to dearest
Bridget-Mary, except the one thing that mattered!

Well! We all know for what reason Le Roi Soleil addressed himself to the
wooing of La Valliere. Louis fell genuinely in love with the decoy, not
quite so Richard. But sometimes, when those proud lips meekly gave back
his kisses, and that lofty beauty humbled itself to obey his will, he
almost wished that he had never met the other. A day came when the secret
orchard he had joyed in with that other was threaded with a golden clue,
and the hidden bower unveiled to the cold-eyed staring day.

Captain Mildare and Lady Lucy Hawting went away together, and from Paris
Richard wrote and broke to the girl who loved him, and had been his
betrothed wife, the common, vulgar, horrible little truth. Bridget-Mary
had been deceived by both of them from the very beginning. Estimate the
numbing, overwhelming weight of that blow, delivered by a hand so
worshipped, upon so proud a heart. Those who saw her, and should have
honoured her great grief with decent reticence, say that she was mad for a
while; that she grovelled on the earth in her abandonment, calling upon
God and man to be merciful and kill her. Pass over this. I cannot bear to
think that the mere love of a Richard Mildare should bring that lofty head
so low.

While the scandal lived in the mouths of Society, Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne
remained unseen. She was pitied--oh, burning, intolerable shame! She was
commiserated as a catspaw, and sneered at as a dupe. Her sisters and her
stepmother, her father and her seven aunts, her relatives, innumerable as
stars in the Milky Way, found infinite relish in the comfortable
conviction that every one of them had said from the very outset that
Bridget-Mary would regret the step she had taken in engaging herself to
that Captain Mildare. Sharp claws of steel were added to her scourge of
humiliation by a thousand petty liberties taken with this, her great,
sacred sorrow, as by letters of sympathy from friends, who wrote as if she
had suffered the loss of a pet hunter, or a prize Persian cat.

A suitor ventured to propose for that white rejected hand, addressing
himself with stammering diffidence to Lord Castleclare. A young man, the
son of an industrious father who had consolidated the sweat of his brow
into three millions and a Peerage, hideously conscious of the raw newness
of his title, painfully burdened with the bosom-weight of a genuine,