Another story was told in solution of the sudden breaking off the match, and ’twas an ugly one and much believed.

A wild young cousin of the lady’s, one given to all the adventures of a man about town, had gone to Tyburn, as was much the elegant fashion, to see a hanging.  The victim was a girl of sixteen, to suffer for the murder of her infant, and as she went to the gallows she screamed aloud in frenzy the name of the child’s father.  The young scapegrace looking on, ’twas said, turned pale on hearing her and went into the crowd, asking questions.  Two hours later he appeared at his cousin’s house and, calling for her guardian, held excited speech with him.

“Mistress Isabel fell like a stone after ten minutes’ talk with them,” ’twas told, “and looked like one when she got into her travelling-coach to drive away next day.  Sir John and his mother had both raged and wept at her door to be let in, but she would see or speak to neither of them.”

From that time it seemed that all was over for Sir John.  He was far worse than poor and in debt, he was out of fashion, and for a man like himself this meant not only humiliation, but impotent rage.  Ladies no longer ogled him and commanded the stopping of their chairs that they might call him to them with coquettish reproaches that he neither came to their assemblies nor bowed and waved hands to them as he sate on the stage at the playhouse; beaux no longer joined him in the coffee-house or on the Mall to ask his opinion of this new beauty or that, and admire the cut of his coat, or the lace on his steenkirk; the new beauty’s successes would not be advanced by his opinion—­a man whom tradespeople dun from morn till night has few additions to his wardrobe and wears few novelties in lace.  Profligacy and defiance of all rules of healthful living had marred his beauty and degraded his youth; his gay wit and spirit had deserted him and left him suspicious and bitter.  He had been forced to put down his equipages and change his fashionable lodgings for cheaper ones; when he lounged in the park his old acquaintances failed to see him; when he gambled he lost.  Downhill he was going, and there was naught to stop him.  For one man in England he had, even in his most flourishing days, cherished a distaste—­the man who was five inches taller than himself, who was incomparably handsomer, and whose rank was such, that to approach him as an equal would have savoured of presumption.  This man, who was indeed my Lord Duke of Osmonde, had irked him from the first, and all the more when he began to realise that for some reason, howsoever often they chanced to be in the same place, it invariably happened that they did not come in contact with each other, Sir John on no occasion being presented to my lord Duke, his Grace on no occasion seeming to observe his presence near him.  At the outset this appeared mere accident, but after a few such encounters ending in nothing, Sir John began to guess that ’twas