Lady Clara Pulleyn,
who was a little pale and languid certainly, but had blue eyes, a
delicate skin, and a pretty person, and knowing her previous history as
well as you who have just perused it, deigned to entertain matrimonial
intentions towards her ladyship.

Not one of the members of these most respectable families, excepting
poor little Clara perhaps, poor little fish (as if she had any call but
to do her duty, or to ask a quelle sauce elle serait mangee), protested
against this little affair of traffic; Lady Dorking had a brood of
little chickens to succeed Clara. There was little Hennie, who was
sixteen, and Biddy, who was fourteen, and Adelaide, and who knows how
many more? How could she refuse a young man, not very agreeable it
is true, nor particularly amiable, nor of good birth, at least on his
father's side, but otherwise eligible, and heir to so many thousands a
year? The Newcomes, on their side, think it a desirable match. Barnes,
it must be confessed, is growing rather selfish, and has some bachelor
ways which a wife will reform. Lady Kew is strongly for the match. With
her own family interest, Lord Steyne and Lord Kew, her nephews, and
Barnes's own father-in-law, Lord Dorking, in the Peers, why shall not
the Newcomes sit there too, and resume the old seat which all the world
knows they had in the time of Richard III.? Barnes and his father had
got up quite a belief about a Newcome killed at Bosworth, along with
King Richard, and hated Henry VII. as an enemy of their noble race. So
all the parties were pretty well agreed. Lady Anne wrote rather a pretty
little poem about welcoming the white Fawn to the Newcome bowers, and
"Clara" was made to rhyme with "fairer," and "timid does and antlered
deer to dot the glades of Chanticlere," quite in a picturesque way. Lady
Kew pronounced that the poem was very pretty indeed.

The year after Jack Belsize made his foreign tour he returned to London
for the season. Lady Clara did not happen to be there; her health was
a little delicate, and her kind parents took her abroad; so all things
went on very smoothly and comfortably indeed.

Yes, but when things were so quiet and comfortable, when the ladies of
the two families had met at the Congress of Baden, and liked each
other so much, when Barnes and his papa the Baronet, recovered from his
illness, were actually on their journey from Aix-la-Chapelle, and Lady
Kew in motion from Kissingen to the Congress of Baden, why