For it cannot be simply his violin playing.  They say he was a pupil of a master of the dark art in Germany, and can practise on us to make us think his commonest utterances extraordinarily acute and precious.  Lord Fleetwood runs round quoting him to everybody, quite ridiculously.  But the man’s influence is sufficient to induce his patron to drive down and fetch the Whitechapel Countess home in state, as she insists—­if the man wishes it.  Depend upon it he is the key of the mystery.

Totally the contrary, Lady Arpington declares! the man is a learned man, formerly a Professor of English Literature in a German University, and no connection of the Whitechapel Countess whatever, a chance acquaintance at the most.  He operates on Lord Fleetwood with doses of German philosophy; otherwise, a harmless creature; and has consented to wash and dress.  It is my lord who has had the chief influence.  And the Countess Livia now backs him in maintaining that there is nowhere a more honest young man to be found.  She may have her reasons.

As for the Whitechapel Countess . . . the whole story of the Old Buccaneer and Countess Fanny was retold, and it formed a terrific halo, presage of rains and hurricane tempest, over the girl the young earl had incomprehensibly espoused to discard.  Those two had a son and a daughter born aboard:—­in wedlock, we trust.  The girl may be as wild a one as the mother.  She has a will as determined as her husband’s.  She is offered Esslemont, the earl’s Kentish mansion, for a residence, and she will none of it until she has him down in the east of London on his knees to entreat her.  The injury was deep on one side or the other.  It may be almost surely prophesied that the two will never come together.  Will either of them deal the stroke for freedom?  And which is the likelier?

Meanwhile Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess composed the laugh of London.  Straightway Invention, the violent propagator, sprang from his shades at a call of the great world’s appetite for more, and, rushing upon stationary Fact, supplied the required.  Marvel upon marvel was recounted.  The mixed origin of the singular issue could not be examined, where all was increasingly funny.

Always the shout for more produced it.  She and her band of Whitechapel boys were about in ambush to waylay the earl wherever he went.  She stood knocking at his door through a whole night.  He dared not lug her before a magistrate for fear of exposure.  Once, riding in the park with a troop of friends he had a young woman pointed out to him, and her finger was levelled, and she cried:  ’There is the English nobleman who marries a girl and leaves her to go selling cabbages!’

He left town for the Island, and beheld his yacht sailing the Solent:—­my lady the countess was on board!  A pair of Tyrolese minstrels in the square kindled his enthusiasm at one of his dinners; he sent them a sovereign; their humble, hearty thanks were returned to him in the name of Die Grafin von Fleetwood.