Rupert lived but four years, after my marriage to his sister.  As soon as he found it necessary to give up the Broadway house, he accepted the use of Riversedge and his sister’s $2000 a-year, with gratitude, and managed to get along on that sum, apparently, down to the hour of his death.  It is true, that I paid his debts, without Lucy’s knowledge, twice in that short period; and I really think he was sensible of his errors, to a certain extent, before his eyes were closed.  He left one child, a daughter, who survived him only a few months.  Major Merton’s complaints had carried him off previously to this.  Between this old officer and myself, there had ever existed a species of cordiality; and I do believe he sometimes remembered his various obligations to me and Marble, in a proper temper.  Like most officials of free governments, he left little or nothing behind him; so that Mrs. Hardinge was totally dependent on her late husband’s friends for a support, during her widowhood.  Emily was one of those semi-worldly characters, that are not absolutely wanting in good qualities, while there is always more or less of a certain disagreeable sort of calculation in all they do.  Rupert’s personal advantages and agreeable manners had first attracted her; and believing him to be Mrs. Bradfort’s heir, she had gladly married him.  I think she lived a disappointed woman, after her father’s death; and I was not sorry when she let us know that she was about to “change her condition,” as it is termed in widow’s parlance, by marrying an elderly man, who possessed the means of giving her all that money can bestow.  With this second, or, according to Venus’s nomenclature, step-husband, she went to Europe, and there remained, dying only three years ago, an amply endowed widow.  We kept up a civil sort of intercourse with her to the last, actually passing a few weeks with her, some fifteen years since, in a house, half-barn, half-castle, that she called a palace, on one of the unrivalled lakes of Italy.  As la Signora Montiera, (Montier) she was sufficiently respected, finishing her career as a dowager of good reputation, and who loved the “pomps and vanities of this wicked world.”  I endeavoured, in this last meeting, to bring to her mind divers incidents of her early life, but with a singular want of success.  They had actually passed, so far as her memory was concerned, into the great gulf of time, keeping company with her sins, and appeared to be entirely forgot.  Nevertheless, la Signora was disposed to treat me and view me with consideration, as soon as she found me living in credit, with money, horses, and carriages at command, and to forget that I had been only a skip-master.  She listened smilingly, and with patience, to what, I dare say, were my prolix narratives, though her own recollections were so singularly impaired.  She did remember something about the wheelbarrow and the canal in Hyde Park; but as for the voyage across the Pacific, most of the incidents had passed out of her mind.  To do her honour, Lucy wore the pearls, on an occasion in which she gave a little festa to her neighbours; and I ascertained she did remember them.  She even hinted to one of her guests, in my hearing, that they had been intended for her originally; but “we cannot command the impulses of the heart, you know, cara mia,” she added, with a very self-complacent sort of a sigh.