There was, Dame Gossip thumps to say, a general belief in this report.  Crowds were on the pavement, peering through the shop-windows.  Carriages driving by stopped to look.  My lord himself had been visible, displaying his array of provisions to friends.  Nor was credulity damped appreciably when over the shop, in gold letters, appeared the name of Sarah Winch.  It might be the countess’s maiden name, if she really was a married countess.

But, in truth, the better informed of the town, having begun to think its Croesus capable of any eccentricity, chose to believe.  They were at the pitch of excitement which demands and will swallow a succession of wilder extravagances.  To accelerate the delirium of the fun, nothing was too much, because any absurdity was anticipated.  And the earl’s readiness to be complimented on the shop’s particular merits, his gratified air at an allusion to it, whirled the fun faster.  He seemed entirely unconscious that each step he now took wakened peals.

For such is the fate of a man who has come to be dogged by the humourist for the provision he furnishes; and, as it happens, he is the more laughable if not in himself a laughable object.  The earl’s handsome figure, fine style, and contrasting sobriety heightened the burlesque of his call to admiration of a shop where Whitechapel would sit in state-according to the fiction so closely under the lee of fact that they were not strictly divisible.  Moreover, Sarah Winch, whom Chumley Potts drew into conversation, said, he vowed, she came up West from Whitechapel.  She said it a little nervously, but without blushing.  Always on the side of the joke, he could ask:  ‘Who can doubt?’ Indeed, scepticism poisoned the sport.

The Old Buccaneer has written:  Friends may laugh; I am not roused.  My enemy’s laugh is a bugle blown in the night.

Our enemy’s laugh at us rouses to wariness, he would say.  He can barely mean, that a condition of drowsihead is other than providently warned by laughter of friends.  An old warrior’s tough fibre would, perhaps, be insensible to that small crackle.  In civil life, however, the friend’s laugh at us is the loudest of the danger signals to stop our course:  and the very wealthy nobleman, who is known for not a fool, is kept from hearing it.  Unless he does hear it, he can have no suspicion of its being about him:  he cannot imagine such ‘lese-majeste’ in the subservient courtiers too prudent to betray a sign.  So Fleetwood was unwarned; and his child-like unconsciousness of the boiling sentiments around, seasoned, pricked, and maddened his parasites under compression to invent, for a faint relief.  He had his title for them, they their tales of him.