The proclamation of the proximate marriage of a young Minister of State and the greatest heiress of her day; notoriously ’The young Minister of State’ of a famous book written by the beautiful, now writhing, woman madly enamoured of him—­and the heiress whose dowry could purchase a Duchy; this was a note to make the gossips of England leap from their beds at the midnight hour and wag tongues in the market-place.  It did away with the political hubbub over the Tonans article, and let it noise abroad like nonsense.  The Hon. Percy Dacier espouses Miss Asper; and she rescues him from the snares of a siren, he her from the toils of the Papists.  She would have gone over to them, she was going when, luckily for the Protestant Faith, Percy Dacier intervened with his proposal.  Town and country buzzed the news; and while that dreary League trumpeted about the business of the nation, a people suddenly become Oriental chattered of nothing but the blissful union to be celebrated in princely state, with every musical accessory, short of Operatic.

Lady Wathin was an active agent in this excitement.  The excellent woman enjoyed marriages of High Life:  which, as there is presumably wealth to support them, are manifestly under sanction:  and a marriage that she could consider one of her own contrivance, had a delicate flavour of a marriage in the family; not quite equal to the seeing a dear daughter of her numerous progeny conducted to the altar, but excelling it in the pomp that bids the heavens open.  She and no other spread the tidings of Miss Asper’s debating upon the step to Rome at the very instant of Percy Dacier’s declaration of his love; and it was a beautiful struggle, that of the half-dedicated nun and her deep-rooted earthly passion, love prevailing!  She sent word to Lady Dunstane:  ’You know the interest I have always taken in dear Constance Aspen’ etc.; inviting her to come on a visit a week before the end of the month, that she might join in the ceremony of a wedding ‘likely to be the grandest of our time.’  Pitiful though it was, to think of the bridal pair having but eight or ten days at the outside, for a honeymoon, the beauty of their ’mutual devotion to duty’ was urged by Lady Wathin upon all hearers.

Lady Dunstane declined the invitation.  She waited to hear from her friend, and the days went by; she could only sorrow for her poor Tony, divining her state.  However little of wrong in the circumstances, they imposed a silence on her decent mind, and no conceivable shape of writing would transmit condolences.  She waited, with a dull heartache:  by no means grieving at Dacier’s engagement to the heiress; until Redworth animated her, as the bearer of rather startling intelligence, indirectly relating to the soul she loved.  An accident in the street had befallen Mr. Warwick.  Redworth wanted to know whether Diana should be told of it, though he had no particulars to give; and somewhat to his disappointment,