her presence from Calesford during her term of mourning; and that he has given his word for the fete on a particular day, before London runs quite dry.  His pledge of his word is notoriously inviolate.  The Countess of Cressett—­an extraordinary instance of a thrice married woman corrected in her addiction to play by her alliance with a rakish juvenile—­declares she performs the part of hostess at the request of the Countess of Fleetwood.  Perfectly convincing.  The more so (if you have the gossips’ keen scent of a deduction) since Lord Fleetwood and young Lord Cressett and the Jesuit Lord Feltre have been seen confabulating with very sacerdotal countenances indeed.  Three English noblemen! not counting eighty years for the whole three!  And dear Lady Cressett fears she may be called on to rescue her boy-husband from a worse enemy than the green tables, if Lady Fleetwood should unhappily prove unyielding, as it shames the gentle sex to imagine she will be.  In fact, we know through Mrs. Levellier, the meeting of reconciliation between the earl and the countess comes off at Lady Arpington’s, by her express arrangement, to-morrow:  ‘none too soon,’ the expectant world of London declared it.

The meeting came to pass three days before the great day at Calesford.  Carinthia and her lord were alone together.  This had been his burning wish at Croridge, where he could have poured his heart to her and might have moved the wife’s.  But she had formed her estimate of him there:  she had, in the comparison or clash of forces with him, grown to contemplate the young man of wealth and rank, who had once been impatient of an allusion to her father, and sought now to part her from her brother—­stop her breathing of fresh air.  Sensationally, too, her ardour for the exercise of her inherited gifts attributed it to him that her father’s daughter had lived the mean existence in England, pursuing a husband, hounded by a mother’s terrors.  The influences environing her and pressing her to submission sharpened her perusal of the small object largely endowed by circumstances to demand it.  She stood calmly discoursing, with a tempered smile:  no longer a novice in the social manner.  An equal whom he had injured waited for his remarks, gave ready replies; and he, bowing to the visible equality, chafed at a sense of inferiority following his acknowledgement of it.  He was alone with her, and next to dumb; she froze a full heart.  As for his heart, it could not speak at all, it was a swinging lump.  The rational view of the situation was exposed to her; and she listened to that favourably, or at least attentively; but with an edge to her civil smile when he hinted of entertainments, voyages, travels, an excursion to her native mountain land.  Her brother would then be facing death.  The rational view, she admitted, was one to be considered.  Yes, they were married; they had a son; they were bound to sink misunderstandings, in the interests of their little son.  He ventured to say that the child was a