way and think of him no more.

But Vera knew that, in all human probability, she would never see him
again, this man, who had once so nearly been her husband. It was another
link of her past life severed. It saddened her, but she knew it was
inevitable.

The little letter-case, at all events, was safely hers; and for many a
night Vera slept with it under her pillow.

CHAPTER XXVII.

DINNER AT RANELAGH.

Here is the whole set, a character dead at every word.

Sheridan.

It was the fag end of the London season; people were talking about
Goodwood and the Ryde week, about grouse and about salmon-fishing.
Members of Parliament went about, like martyrs at the stake, groaning
over the interminable nature of every debate, and shaking their heads
over the prospect of getting away. Women in society knew all their own
and their neighbours' dresses by heart, and were dead sick of them all;
and even the very gossip and scandal that is always afloat to keep up the
spirits of the idlers and the chatterers had lost all the zest, all the
charm of novelty that gave flavour and piquancy to every _canard_ that
was started two months ago.

It was all stale, flat, and unprofitable.

What was the use of constantly asserting, on the very best authority,
that Lady So-and-so was on the eve of running away with that handsome
young actor, whose eyes had taken the female population by storm, when
Lady So-and-so persisted in walking about arm-in-arm with her husband day
after day, with a child on either side of them, in the most provoking
way, as though to prove the utter fallacy of the report, and her own
incontestable domestic felicity? Or, what merit had a man any longer who
had stated in May that the heiress _par excellence_ of the season was
about to sell herself and her gold to that debauched and drunken marquis,
who had evidently not six months of life left in him in which to enjoy
his bargain, when the heiress herself gave the lie to the _on dit_ in
July by talking calmly about going to Norway with her papa for a month's
retirement and rest after the fatigues of the season?

What a number of lies are there not propounded during the months of May
and June by the inventive Londoner, and how many of them are there not
proved to be so during the latter end of July!

Heaven only knows how and where the voice of scandal is first raised. Is
it at the five o'clock tea-tables? Or, is it in the smoking-rooms of the
clubs tha