The three guardian ladies and their strings of followers headed over the fevered and benighted town, as the records of the period attest, windpiping these and similar Solan notes from the undigested cropful of alarms Lord Fleetwood’s expected conduct crammed into them.  They and all the world traced his present madness to the act foregoing:  that marriage!  They reviewed it to deplore it, every known incident and the numbers imagined; yet merely to deplore:  frightful comparisons of then with now rendered the historical shock to the marriage market matter for a sick smile.  Evil genius of some sort beside him the wealthy young nobleman is sure to have.  He has got rid of one to take up with a viler.  First, a sluttish trollop of German origin is foisted on him for life; next, he is misled to abjure the faith of his fathers for Rome.  But patently, desperation in the husband of such a wife weakened his resistance to the Roman Catholic pervert’s insinuations.  There we punctuate the full stop to our inquiries; we have the secret.

And upon that, suddenly comes a cyclonic gust; and gossip twirls, whines, and falls to the twanging of an entirely new set of notes, that furnish a tolerably agreeable tune, on the whole.  O hear!  The Marchioness of Arpington proclaims not merely acquaintanceship with Lord Fleetwood’s countess, she professes esteem for the young person.  She has been heard to say, that if the Principality of Wales were not a royal title, a dignity of the kind would be conferred by the people of those mountains on the Countess of Fleetwood:  such unbounded enthusiasm there was for her character when she sojourned down there.  As it is, they do speak of her in their Welsh by some title.  Their bards are offered prizes to celebrate her deeds.  You remember the regiment of mounted Welsh gentlemen escorting her to her Kentish seat, with their band of the three-stringed harps!  She is well-born, educated, handsome, a perfectly honest woman, and a sound Protestant.  Quite the reverse of Lord Fleetwood’s seeking to escape her, it is she who flies; she cannot forgive him his cruelties and infidelities:  and that is the reason why he threatens to commit the act of despair.  Only she can save him!  She has flown for refuge to her uncle, Lord Levellier’s house at a place named Croridge—­not in the gazetteer—­hard of access and a home of poachers, where shooting goes on hourly; but most picturesque and romantic, as she herself is!  Lady Arpington found her there, nursing one of the wounded, and her uncle on his death-bed; obdurate all round against her husband, but pensive when supplicated to consider her country endangered by Rome.  She is a fervent patriot.  The tales of her Whitechapel origin, and heading mobs wielding bludgeons, are absolutely false, traceable to scandalizing anecdotists like Mr. Rose Mackrell.  She is the beautiful example of an injured wife doing honour to her sex in the punishment of a faithless