The next morning, however, the widow left the gentleman’s lodgings, on the pretext that it was injudicious for her friends to know of their union at present, and continued to visit her sposo and sup somewhat amply at his chambers from time to time.  We can imagine the anxiety Orlando now felt for a cheque book at the heiress’s bankers, and the many insinuations he may have delicately made, touching ways and means.  We can fancy the artful excuses with which these hints were put aside by his attached wife.  But the dupe was still in happy ignorance of the trick played on him, and for a time such ignorance was bliss.  It must have been trying to him to be called on by Mrs. Villars for the promised douceur, but he consoled himself with the pleasures of hope.

Unfortunately, however, he had formed the acquaintance of a woman of a very different reputation to the real Mrs. Deleau, and the intimacy which ensued was fatal to him.

When Charles II. was wandering abroad, he was joined, among others, by a Mr. and Mrs. Palmer.  The husband was a stanch old Romanist, with the qualities which usually accompanied that faith in those days—­little respect for morality, and a good deal of bigotry.  In later days he was one of the victims suspected of the Titus Oates plot, but escaped, and eventually died in Wales, in 1705, after having been James II.’s ambassador to Rome.  This, in a few words, is the history of that Roger Palmer, afterwards Lord Castlemaine, who by some is said to have sold his wife—­not at Smithfield, but at Whitehall—­to his Majesty King Charles II., for the sum of one peerage—­an Irish one, taken on consideration:  by others, is alleged to have been so indignant with the king as to have remained for some time far from court; and so disgusted with his elevation to the peerage as scarcely to assume his title; and this last is the most authenticated version of the matter.

Mrs. Palmer belonged to one of the oldest families in England, and traced her descent to Pagan de Villiers, in the days of William Rufus, and a good deal farther among the nobles of Normandy.  She was the daughter of William, second Viscount Grandison, and rejoiced in the appropriate name of Barbara, for she could be savage occasionally.  She was very beautiful, and very wicked, and soon became Charles’s mistress.  On the Restoration she joined the king in England, and when the poor neglected queen came over was foisted upon her as a bedchamber-woman, in spite of all the objections of that ill used wife.  It was necessary to this end that she should be the wife of a peer; and her husband accepted the title of Earl of Castlemaine, well knowing to what he owed it.  Pepys, who admired Lady Castlemaine more than any woman in England, describes the husband and wife meeting at Whitehall with a cold ceremonial bow:  yet the husband was there.  A quarrel between the two, strangely enough on the score of religion, her ladyship insisting that her