lady had heard my question, and
looked up in his face with an expression that said--'I'll hear more of
that affair before long.'

'Monsieur has given you his place, sir,' said the waiter, arranging a
chair at No. 14. 'I have put _you_ at 83.'

'All right,' replied Jack, as if no recognition were called for on
his part, and that he was not sorry to be separated from one with an
unpleasant memory.

'I am shocked, sir,' said the lady, addressing me in her blandest
accents, 'at our depriving you of your place, but Mr. Carrisbrook will,
I 'm sure, give you his.'

While I protested against such a surrender, and Mr. Carrisbrook looked
very much annoyed at the proposal, the lady only insisted the more, and
it ended in Mr. Carrisbrook--one of the youths already mentioned--being
sent down to 83, while I took up my position in front of the party in
his place.

I knew to what circumstance I was indebted for this favourable
notice; she looked up to me as a kind of king's evidence, whenever the
Honourable Jack should be called up for trial, and already I had seen a
great deal into the history and relative position of all parties. Such
was the state of matters when the soup appeared.

And now, to impart to my readers, as is my wont, such information as
I possessed afterwards, and not to keep them waiting for the order in
which I obtained it: the party before me consisted of Sir Marmaduke
Lonsdall and his lady--he, an old general officer of good family and
connections, who, with most unexceptionable manners and courtly address,
had contrived to spend a very easy, good-for-nothing existence, without
ever seeing an hour's service, his clubs and his dinner-parties filling
up life tolerably well, with the occasional excitement arising from who
was in and who was out, to season the whole. Sometimes a Lord of
the Treasury, with a seat for a Government borough, and sometimes
patriotically sitting among the opposition when his friends were out, he
was looked upon as a very honourable, straightforward person, who could
not be 'overlooked' when his party were distributing favours.

My Lady Lonsdall was a _soi-disant_ heiress, the daughter of some person
unknown in the city, the greater part of whose fortune was unhappily
embarked in Poyais Scrip--a fact only ascertained when too late, and,
consequently, though discoursing most eloquently in a prospectus
about mines of gold and silver, strata of pearl necklaces, and diamond
ear-rings, a