Lady Judith Topsparkle had all these blessings, and flashed gayety and brightness upon the world in which her lot was cast; and yet there were those among her intimates, those who sipped their chocolate with her of a morning before her hair was powdered or her patches put on, who declared that she was not altogether happy.

The diamonds, the spacious house in Soho Square, with its Turkey carpets and Boule furniture, its plenitude of massive plate and Italian pictures, its air of regal luxury and splendor; the abbey near Ringwood, with its tapestries, pictures, curios, and secret passages, were burdened with a certain condition which for Lady Judith reduced their value to a minimum.

All these good things came to her through her husband.  Of her own right she was only the genteelest pauper at the court end of London.  Her blood was of the bluest.  She was a younger daughter of one of the oldest earls; but Job himself, after the advent of the messengers, was not poorer than that distinguished nobleman.  Lady Judith had brought Mr. Topsparkle nothing but her beauty, her quality, and her pride.  Love she never pretended to bring him, nor liking, nor even respect.  His father had made his fortune in trade; and the idea of a tradesman’s son was almost as repulsive to Lady Judith as that of a blackamoor.  She married him because her father made her marry him, and in her own phraseology “the matter was not worth fighting about.”  She had broken just two years before with the only man she had ever loved, had renounced him in a fit of pique and passion on account of some scandal about a French dancing-girl; and from that hour she had assumed an air of recklessness:  she had danced, flirted, talked, and carried on in a manner that delighted the multitude and shocked the prudes.  Bath and Tunbridge Wells had rung with her sayings and doings; and finally she surrendered herself, not altogether unwillingly, to the highest bidder.

She was burdened with debt, never knew what it was to have a crown piece of ready money.  At cards she had to borrow first of one admirer and then of another.  She had been able to get plenty of credit for gowns and trinketry from a harpy class of West End tradespeople, who speculated in Lady Judith’s beauty as they might have done in some hazardous but hopeful stock; counting it almost a certainty that she would make a splendid match and recoup them all.

Mr. Topsparkle saw her in the zenith of her audacious charms.  He met her at a masquerade at Bath, followed and intrigued with her all the evening, and at last, alone in an alcove with her after supper, induced her to take off her mask.  Her beauty dazzled those experienced eyes of his, and he fell madly in love with her at first sight of that radiant loveliness:  starriest eyes of violet hue, a dainty little Greek nose, a complexion of lilies and blush-roses, and the most perfect mouth and teeth in Christendom.  No one had ever seen anything more beautiful than