Desiring loneliness or else Lord Feltre’s company, Fleetwood had to grant a deferred audience at home to various tradesmen, absurdly fussy about having the house of his leased estate of Calesford furnished complete and habitable on the very day stipulated by his peremptory orders that the place should be both habitable and hospitable.  They were right, they were excused; grand entertainments of London had been projected, and he fell into the weariful business with them, thinking of Henrietta’s insatiable appetite for the pleasures.  He had taken the lease of this burdensome Calesford, at an eight-miles’ drive from the Northwest of town, to gratify the devouring woman’s taste which was, to have all the luxuries of the town in a framework of country scenery.

Gower Woodseer and he were dining together in the evening.  The circumstance was just endurable, but Gower would play the secretary, and doggedly subjected him to hear a statement of the woeful plight of Countess Livia’s affairs.  Gower, commissioned to examine them, remarked:  ‘If we have all the figures!’

‘If we could stop the bleeding!’ Fleetwood replied.  ’Come to the Opera to-night; I promised.  I promised Abrane for to-morrow.  There’s no end to it.  This gambling mania’s a flux.  Not one of them except your old enemy, Corby, keeps clear of it; and they’re at him for subsidies, as they are at me, and would be at you or any passenger on the suspected of a purse.  Corby shines among them.’

That was heavy judgement enough, Gower thought.  No allusion to Esslemont ensued.  The earl ate sparely, and silently for the most part.

He was warmed a little at the Opera by hearing Henrietta’s honest raptures over her Columelli in the Pirata.  But Lord Brailstone sat behind her, and their exchange of ecstasies upon the tattered pathos of

E il mio tradito amor,

was not moderately offensive.

His countenance in Henrietta’s presence had to be studied and interpreted by Livia.  Why did it darken?  The demurest of fuliginous intriguers argued that Brail stone was but doing the spiriting required of him, and would have to pay the penalty unrewarded, let him Italianize as much as he pleased.  Not many months longer, and there would be the bit of an outburst, the whiff of scandal, perhaps a shot, and the rupture of an improvident alliance, followed by Henrietta’s free hand to the moody young earl, who would then have possession of the only woman he could ever love:  and at no cost.  Jealousy of a man like Brailstone, however infatuated the man, was too foolish.  He must perceive how matters were tending?  The die-away acid eyeballs-at-the-ceiling of a pair of fanatics per la musica might irritate a husband, but the lover should read and know.  Giddy as the beautiful creature deprived of her natural aliment seems in her excuseable hunger for it, she has learnt her lesson, she is not a reeling libertine.