‘A shop,’ Lady Arpington explained for his better direction:  ’potatoes, vegetable stuff.  Honest people, I am to believe.  She is indifferent to her food, she says.  She works, helping one of their ministers—­one of their denominations:  heaven knows what they call themselves!  Anything to escape from the Church!  She’s likely to become a Methodist.  With Lord Feltre proselytizing for his Papist creed, Lord Pitscrew a declared Mohammedan, we shall have a pretty English aristocracy in time.  Well, she may claim to belong to it now.  She would not be persuaded against visitations to pestiferous hovels.  What else is there to do in such a place?  She goes about catching diseases to avoid bilious melancholy in the dark back room of a small greengrocer’s shop in Whitechapel.  There—­you have the word for the Countess of Fleetwood’s present address.’

It drenched him with ridicule.

‘I am indebted to your ladyship for the information,’ he said, and maintained his rigidity.

The great lady stiffened.

’I am obliged to ask you whether you intend to act on it at once.  The admiral has gone; I am in some sort deputed as a guardian to her, and I warn you—­very well, very well.  In your own interests, it will be.  If she is left there another two or three days, the name of the place will stick to her.’

‘She has baptized herself with it already, I imagine,’ said Fleetwood.  ‘She will have Esslemont to live in.’

‘There will be more than one to speak as to that.  You should know her.’

‘I do not know her.’

‘You married her.’

‘The circumstances are admitted.’

’If I may hazard a guess, she is unlikely to come to terms without a previous interview.  She is bent on meeting you.’

’I am to be subjected to further annoyance, or she will take the name of the place she at present inhabits, and bombard me with it.  Those are the terms.’

‘She has a brother living, I remind you.’

‘State the deduction, if you please, my lady.’

’She is not of ‘a totally inferior family.’

’She had a father famous over England as the Old Buccaneer, and is a diligent reader of his book of maxims for men.’

’Dear me!  Then Kirby—­Captain Kirby!  I remember.  That’s her origin, is it?’ the great lady cried, illumined.  ’My mother used to talk of the Cressett scandal.  Old Lady Arpington, too.  At any rate, it ended in their union—­the formalities were properly respected, as soon as they could be.’

‘I am unaware.’

’I detest such a tone of speaking.  Speaking as you do now—­married to the daughter?  You are not yourself, Lord Fleetwood.’

’Quite, ma’am, let me assure you.  Otherwise the Kirby-Cressetts would be dictating to me from the muzzle of one of the old rapscallion’s Maxims.  They will learn that I am myself.’

’You don’t improve as you proceed.  I tell you this, you’ll not have me for a friend.  You have your troops of satellites; but take it as equal to a prophecy, you won’t have London with you; and you’ll hear of Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess till your ears ache.’