friends to know of their
union at present, and continued to visit her sposo and sup somewhat
amply at his chambers from time to time. We can imagine the anxiety
Orlando now felt for a cheque book at the heiress's bankers, and the
many insinuations he may have delicately made, touching ways and means.
We can fancy the artful excuses with which these hints were put aside by
his attached wife. But the dupe was still in happy ignorance of the
trick played on him, and for a time such ignorance was bliss. It must
have been trying to him to be called on by Mrs. Villars for the promised
douceur, but he consoled himself with the pleasures of hope.

Unfortunately, however, he had formed the acquaintance of a woman of a
very different reputation to the real Mrs. Deleau, and the intimacy
which ensued was fatal to him.

When Charles II. was wandering abroad, he was joined, among others, by a
Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. The husband was a stanch old Romanist, with the
qualities which usually accompanied that faith in those days--little
respect for morality, and a good deal of bigotry. In later days he was
one of the victims suspected of the Titus Oates plot, but escaped, and
eventually died in Wales, in 1705, after having been James II.'s
ambassador to Rome. This, in a few words, is the history of that Roger
Palmer, afterwards Lord Castlemaine, who by some is said to have sold
his wife--not at Smithfield, but at Whitehall--to his Majesty King
Charles II., for the sum of one peerage--an Irish one, taken on
consideration: by others, is alleged to have been so indignant with the
king as to have remained for some time far from court; and so disgusted
with his elevation to the peerage as scarcely to assume his title; and
this last is the most authenticated version of the matter.

Mrs. Palmer belonged to one of the oldest families in England, and
traced her descent to Pagan de Villiers, in the days of William Rufus,
and a good deal farther among the nobles of Normandy. She was the
daughter of William, second Viscount Grandison, and rejoiced in the
appropriate name of Barbara, for she _could_ be savage occasionally. She
was very beautiful, and very wicked, and soon became Charles's mistress.
On the Restoration she joined the king in England, and when the poor
neglected queen came over was foisted upon her as a bedchamber-woman, in
spite of all the objections of that ill used wife. It was necessary to
this end that she should be the wife of a peer