More and more wonderful, we hear that he drove his bride straight from the church to the field of a prizefight, arranged for her special delectation.  She doats on seeing blood-shed and drinking champagne.  Young Mr. Mallard is our authority; and he says, she enjoyed it, and cheered the victor for being her husband’s man.  And after the shocking exhibition, good-bye; the Countess of Fleetwood was left sole occupant of a wayside inn, and may have learnt in her solitude that she would have been wise to feign disgust; for men to the smallest degree cultivated are unable to pardon a want of delicacy in a woman who has chosen them, as they are taught to think by their having chosen her.

So talked, so twittered, piped and croaked the London world over the early rumours of the marriage, this Amazing Marriage; which it got to be called, from the number of items flocking to swell the wonder.

Ravens ravening by night, poised peregrines by day, provision-merchants for the dispensing of dainty scraps to tickle the ears, to arm the tongues, to explode reputations, those great ladies, the Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, fateful three of their period, avenged and scourged both innocence and naughtiness; innocence, on the whole, the least, when their withering suspicion of it had hunted the unhappy thing to the bank of Ophelia’s ditch.  Mallard and Chumley Potts, Captain Abrane, Sir Meeson Corby, Lord Brailstone, were plucked at and rattled, put to the blush, by a pursuit of inquiries conducted with beaks.  High-nosed dames will surpass eminent judges in their temerity on the border-line where Ahem sounds the warning note to curtained decency.  The courtly M. de St. Ombre had to stand confused.  He, however, gave another version of Captain Abrane’s ‘fiddler,’ and precipitated the great ladies into the reflection, that French gentlemen, since the execrable French Revolution, have lost their proper sense of the distinctions of Class.  Homme d’esprit, applied to a roving adventurer, a scarce other than vagabond, was either an undiscriminating epithet or else a further example of the French deficiency in humour.

Dexterous contriver, he undoubtedly is.  Lady Cowry has it from Sir Meeson Corby, who had it from the poor dowager, that Lord Fleetwood has installed the man in his house and sits at the opposite end of his table; fished him up from Whitechapel, where the countess is left serving oranges at a small fruit-shop.  With her own eyes, Lady Arpington saw her there; and she can’t be got to leave the place unless her husband drives his coach down to fetch her.  That he declines to do; so she remains the Whitechapel Countess, all on her hind heels against the offer of a shilling of her husband’s money, if she ’s not to bring him to his knees; and goes about at night with a low Methodist singing hymns along those dreadful streets, while Lord Fleetwood gives gorgeous entertainments.  One signal from the man he has hired, and he stops drinking—­he will stop speaking as soon as the man’s mouth is open.  He is under a complete fascination, attributable, some say, to passes of the hands, which the man won’t wash lest he should weaken their influence.