Ad.  There, believe me, you are mistaken; but it is a point impossible to discuss.  Good-bye, Lady Elaine.  Thanks for your frankness and patience with me.  Perhaps I shall get over it, as you say.  I shall take refuge in my yacht, and try the curative effect of a cruise round the world.  It will be a year at least before we meet again. [Exit Adolphus.

El.  Poor Adolphus! how absolutely impossible is love, where the hidden sympathy of soul is wanting!—­and yet how nice he is [sighs], and how manfully he accepted his fate!  What philosophy can really explain the mystery of that magnetic affinity called love, which so unaccountably exercises its attracting influences over the whole animal creation, and most probably over plants?  If it is a latent potentiality of matter, how did it get there?  Now for a scene with mamma.

[Exit Elaine.

SCENE III.—­The Countess of Gules’s Boudoir.  Lady Gules and Lady Elaine reading.  Enter Charles with card and letter.

El. [reading card].  Mr Adolphus Plumper!  Is the gentleman coming up-stairs, Charles?

Charles.  No, my lady; he only left the card and this letter, and said he would call again. [Exit Charles.

El. [opening letter].  From Mr Gresham, mamma, dated Naples. [Reads.] “DEAR ELAINE,—­I felt so much touched by the kindness of your last words to me when we parted, that I venture to hope that it may interest you to know, as a friend, how it has fared with me since I left England.  The curative process does not seem to have fairly set in yet, but I am going to try the effect of a little mild excitement by joining the demonstrating fleets at Alexandria.  For a month past I have been idling here; and curiously enough, the first person I stumbled upon in the Chiaja Gardens was Mr Adolphus Plumper—­our railway companion on the only journey I ever had the happiness to take with you, and who seated himself by my side on a bench to which I had resorted for a quiet cigar.  As there are few foreigners here at this season, we have been thrown almost daily together, and I have been quite delighted to find how very much superior he is to what I thought he looked when you honoured me by pointing out our resemblance.  I ought to speak highly of him, for he saved my life.  I took him a cruise in my yacht, and the gig in which we were landing one day was upset in some breakers.  I had been stunned, and should have been drowned had he not come to the rescue; and I really feel that for this and some other reasons which I will explain when we meet, I owe him a debt of gratitude that I can never hope to repay.  Although he is too retiring by nature to say so, I could see, when I made some laughing allusions to the occasion of our first meeting, that he would be glad to continue to make the acquaintance of Lord and Lady Gules—­in other words, to continue the political discussion he