To look at Lady Marabout as she sat in her amber satin couch that morning, pleasant, smiling, well-dressed, well-looking, with the grace of good birth and the sunniness of good nature plainly written on her smooth brow and her kindly eyes, and wealth--delicious little god!--stamping itself all about her, from the diamond rings on her soft white fingers to the broidered shoe on the feet, of whose smallness she was still proud, one might have ignorantly imagined her to be the most happy, enviable, well-conditioned, easy-going dowager in the United Kingdom. But appearances are deceptive, and if we believe what she constantly asserted, Lady Marabout was very nearly worn into her grave by a thousand troubles; her almshouses, whose roofs would eternally blow off with each high wind; her dogs, whom she would overfeed; her ladies' maids, who were only hired to steal, tease, or scandalize her; the begging letter-writers, who distilled tears from her eyes and sovereigns from her purse, let Carruthers disclose their hypocrisies as he might; the bolder begging-letters, written by hon. secs., and headed by names with long handles, belonging to Pillars of the State and Lights of the Church, which compelled her to make a miserable choice between a straitened income or a remorseful conscience--tormented, in fine, with worries small and large, from her ferns, on which she spent a large fortune, and who drooped maliciously in their glass cases, with an ill-natured obstinacy characteristic of desperately-courted individuals, whether of the floral or the human world, to those marriageable young ladies whom she took under her wing to usher into the great world, and who were certain to run counter to her wishes and overthrow her plans, to marry ill, or not marry at all, or do something or other to throw discredit on her chaperoning abilities. She was, she assured us, _pétrie_ with worries, small and large, specially as she was so eminently sunny, affable, and radiant a looking person, that all the world took their troubles to her, selected her as their confidante, and made her the repository of their annoyances; but her climax of misery was to be compelled to chaperone, and as a petition for some débutante to be intrusted to her care was invariably made each season, and "No" was a monosyllable into which her lips utterly refused to form themselves, each season did her life become a burden to her. There was never any rest for the soul of Helena, Countess of Marabout, till her house in Lowndes Square was shut up, and her charges off her hand, and she could return in peace to her jointure-villa at Twickenham, or to Carruthers' old Hall of Deepdene, and among her flowers, her birds, and her hobbies, throw off for a while the weary burden of her worries as a chaperone.