But the lady, though absent, did not figure poorly at all.  Granting Whitechapel and the shillelagh affair, certain whispers of her good looks, contested only to be the more violently asserted; and therewith Rose Mackrell’s tale of her being a ‘young woman of birth,’ having a ‘romantic story to tell of herself and her parentage,’ made her latest performance the champagne event of it hitherto.  Men sparkled when they had it on their lips.

How, then, London asked, would the Earl of Fleetwood move his pieces in reply to his countess’s particularly clever indication of the check threatening mate?

His move had no relation to the game, it was thought at first.  The world could not suppose that he moved a simple pawn on his marriage board.  He purchased a shop in Piccadilly for the sale of fruit and flowers.

Lady Arpington was entreated to deal at the shop, Countess Livia had her orders; his friends, his parasites and satellites, were to deal there.  Intensely earnest as usual, he besought great ladies to let him have the overflow of their hothouses; and they classing it as another of the mystifications of a purse crazy for repleteness, inquired:  ’But is it you we are to deal with?’ And he quite seriously said:  ’With me, yes, at present.’  Something was behind the curtain, of course.  His gravity had the effect of the ultra-comical in concealing it.

The shop was opened.  We have the assurance of Rose Mackrell, that he entered and examined the piles and pans of fruit, and the bouquets cunningly arranged by a hand smelling French.  The shop was roomy, splendid windows lighted the yellow, the golden, the green and parti-coloured stores.  Four doors off, a chemist’s motley in bellied glasses crashed on the sight.  Passengers along the pavement had presented to them such a contrast as might be shown if we could imagine the Lethean ferry-boatload brought sharp against Pomona’s lapful.  In addition to the plucked flowers and fruits of the shop, Rose Mackrell more attentively examined the samples doing service at the counters.  They were three, under supervision of a watchful-eyed fourth.  Dame Gossip is for quoting his wit.  But the conclusion he reached, after quitting the shop and pacing his dozen steps, is important; for it sent a wind over the town to set the springs of tattle going as wildly as when the herald’s trumpet blew the announcement for the world to hear out of Wales.

He had observed, that the young woman supervising was deficient in the ease of an established superior; her brows were troubled; she was, therefore, a lieutenant elevated from a lower grade; and, to his thinking, conducted the business during the temporary retirement of the mistress of the shop.

And the mistress of the shop?

The question hardly needs be put.

Rose Mackrell or his humour answered it in unfaltering terms.

London heard, with the variety of feelings which are indistinguishable under a flooding amazement, that the beautiful new fruit and flower shop had been purchased and stocked by the fabulously wealthy young Earl of Fleetwood, to give his Whitechapel Countess a taste for business, an occupation, and an honourable means of livelihood.