When Mrs. Rushton, by the aid of water, pungent essences, and the relief which even an hour of time seldom fails to yield in such cases, had partially recovered her equanimity, she determined, after careful consideration of the best course of action, to consult a solicitor of eminence, well acquainted with her late husband, upon the matter.  She had a dim notion that the Alien Act, if it could be put in motion, might rid her of Mademoiselle de Tourville and her friends.  Thus resolving, and ever scrupulous as to appearances, she carefully smoothed her ruffled plumage, changed her disordered dress, and directed the carriage, which had been dismissed, to be again brought round to the door.  “Mary,” she added a few moments afterwards, “bring me my jewel-case—­the small one:  you will find it in Made—­in that French person’s dressing-room.”

Mary Austin reappeared in answer to the violent ringing of her impatient lady’s bell, and stated that the jewel-case could nowhere be found in Mademoiselle’s dressing-room.  “Her clothes, everything belonging to her, had been taken out of the wardrobe, and carried away, and perhaps that also in mistake no doubt.”

“Nonsense, woman!” replied Mrs. Rushton.  “I left it not long ago on her toilet-glass.  I intended to show her a purchase I had made, and not finding her, left it as I tell you.”

Another search was made with the same ill-success.  Mary Austin afterwards said that when she returned to her mistress the second time, to say that the jewel-case was certainly gone, an expression of satisfaction instead of anger, it seemed to her, glanced across Mrs. Rushton’s face, who immediately left the room, and in a few minutes afterwards was driven off in the carriage.

About an hour after her departure I called in Harley Street for Arthur Rushton, with whom I had engaged to go this evening to the theatre to witness Mrs. Siddons’s Lady Macbeth, which neither of us had yet seen.  I found him in a state of calmed excitement, if I may so express myself; and after listening with much interest to the minute account he gave me of what had passed, I, young and inexperienced as I was in such affairs, took upon myself to suggest that, as the lady he nothing doubted was as irreproachable in character as she was confessedly charming and attractive in person and manners, and as he was unquestionably his own master, Mrs. Rushton’s opposition was not likely to be of long continuance; and that as to Mademoiselle de Tourville’s somewhat discouraging expression, such sentences from the lips of ladies—­

    “That would be wooed, and not unsought be won”—­

were seldom, if ever, I had understood, to be taken in a literal and positive sense.  Under this mild and soothing treatment, Mr. Rushton gradually threw off a portion of the load that oppressed him, and we set off in tolerably cheerful mood for the theatre.