Moreover, Simeon Larpent's admiration was distasteful to her. He had then but recently come back to Paris from Lisbon, from which he brought no particular good character, while he appeared by his conversation and mode of life to have contracted many extremely bad habits. In the Paris of those days the practice and admiration of morality stood at a terribly low point, yet Simeon Larpent seemed more depraved than most young men were in that city even. In a morose and sullen fashion he revelled in all the iniquities that prevailed during the middle of Louis XV's reign, and his name became noted in English circles as that of a man unscrupulous and abandoned, as well as shifty and cunning. Moreover, even his Jacobitism was looked upon with doubtful eyes, and not a few were heard to say that the hour which witnessed his father's death would also see him an avowed Hanoverian. That such would have been the case was certain, had not, however, the old lord's death taken place at the very moment when Charles Edward made the last Stuart bid for restoration in England. But at such a time it was impossible that the new peer could approach the English king. Had he done so it would have been more than his life was worth. At the best, he would have been forced into a duel with some infuriated Jacobite; at the worst, his body would have been found in the Seine, stabbed to the heart. Meanwhile those events which Lady Fordingbridge had spoken of in her letter to Bertie Elphinston had taken place; nothing was heard by her either of her lover or the Sholtos, and she became the wife of Fordingbridge. For a month he revelled in the possession of the beautiful woman he had coveted since first he set eyes on her; then she found out the truth and his lordship had no longer a wife except in name. She had one interview with him--alone--and after that had taken place she never willingly spoke to him again. Her pride forbade her to separate from him, but with the exception that the same roof sheltered and the same walls enclosed them, they might as well have dwelt in different streets. Against all his protestations, his vows, his declarations that love, and love alone, had forced him to play the part he had, she turned a deaf ear; she would not even open her lips if possible, to show that she had heard his words. She had come to hate and despise him--as she told him in that one interview--and her every action afterwards testified that she had spoken the truth.