"Arthur Cardonnel is excessively handsome! Such very good style! Isn't it a pity they're all so poor! His father played away everything--literally everything. The sons have no more to marry upon, any one of them, than if they were three crossing-sweepers," said her ladyship, carelessly, driving home from St. Paul's one Sunday morning. And, watching the effect of her stray arrow, she had beheld an actual flush on the beauty's fair, impassive cheek, and had positively heard a smothered sigh from an admirably brought-up heart, no more given ordinarily to such weaknesses than the diamond-studded heart pendent from her bracelet, the belle's heart and the bracelet's heart being both formed alike, to fetch their price, and bid to do no more:--power of volition would have been as inconvenient in, and interfered as greatly with, the sale of one as of the other. "She does like him!" sighed Lady Marabout over that Sabbath's luncheon wines. "It's always my fate--always; and Goodwood, never won before, will be thrown--actually thrown--away, as if he were the younger son of a Nobody!" which horrible waste was so terrible to her imagination that Lady Marabout could positively have shed tears at the bare prospect, and might have shed them, too, if the Hon. Val, the butler, two footmen, and a page had not inconveniently happened to be in the room at the time, so that she was driven to restrain her feelings and drink some Amontillado instead. Lady Marabout is not the first person by a good many who has had to smile over sherry with a breaking heart. Ah! lips have quivered as they laughed over Chambertin, and trembled as they touched the bowl of a champagne-glass. Wine has assisted at many a joyous festa enough, but some that has been drunk in gayety has caught gleams, in the eyes of the drinkers, of salt water brighter than its brightest sparkles: water that no other eyes can see. Because we may drink Badminton laughingly when the gaze of Society the Non-Sympathetic is on us, do you think we must never have tasted any more bitter dregs? _Va-t'en, bécasse!_ where have you lived! Nero does not always fiddle while Rome is burning from utter heartlessness, believe me, but rather--sometimes, perhaps--because his heart is aching! "Goodwood will propose to-night, I fancy, he is so very attentive," thought Lady Marabout, sitting with her sister chaperones on the cosy causeuses of a mansion in Carlton Terrace, at one of the last balls of the departing season. "I never saw dear Valencia look better, and certainly her waltzing is----Ah! good evening, Major Cardonnel! Very warm to-night, is it not? I shall be so glad when I am down again at Fernditton. Town, in the first week of July, is really not habitable." And she furled her fan, and smiled on him with her pleasant eyes, and couldn't help wishing he hadn't been on the Marchioness Rondeletia's visiting list, he _was_ such a detrimental, and he was ten times handsomer than Goodwood!