It was nearly a twelvemonth afterwards that I was one of three hundred who crowded, almost to bursting, two small drawing-rooms, not a hundred miles from Cavendish Square. I had picked up a lost fan, while the hurry and bustle of departure was going on, and was examining it in a fit of vacant abstraction, when I heard some charitable old lady annoying her friends with officious inquiries: “Where is Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Who has seen Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Where can Miss Lepicq’s fan be?” I started from my trance. The deuce take the fan, and the querist--but where is Miss Lepicq? She had just left the room--her carriage was stopping the way. I rushed to the landing-place, cleared the stairs with the celerity of a kangaroo, overturned a brace of footmen, and broke my shins over the pole of a sedan, arriving at the house-door just in time to see the last gleam of a kid slipper glide into the concealment of a carriage, to hear the “Home!” of the footman, and to make the best of my way to my hotel, with a head-ache and a sprained ankle. Inquiries were bootless; she left London, England, the world; for she shut herself up in a convent, Heaven knows why: and, as her epitaph might say, is remembered with regret by all who knew her--and by one who did not. Perhaps I ought not to lament--perhaps I do not lament--that I saw no more of Adèle Lepicq. I might have been blind to beauties which all the world adored; I might have discovered imperfections of which no others dreamed. It is pleasant, when I find in all I meet some little admixture of human frailty, to look back to one object which appears still all divine; it is charming, when I am deserted by the fondest friends, betrayed by the dearest hopes, to cling to an imaginative pleasure from which I can expect no treason or desertion. I have flirted with some score of beauties with sufficiently great perseverance, and sufficiently poor success; I have been desperately in love more than once; but if all the rapture of my real passions were set in one scale of a balance, and the luxury of this ideal one were put into the other, I believe the madder weight of the two would preponderate. I remember that in the fervour of my last disappointment I wrote a very fine copy of verses to the same effect; and thus, or nearly thus, they ran-- Many a beaming brow I’ve known, And many a dazzling eye, And I’ve listened to many a melting tone In magic fleeting by; And mine was never a heart of stone, And yet my heart hath given to none The tribute of a sigh; For fancy’s wild and witching mirth Was dearer than aught I found on earth; And the fairest forms I ever knew Were far less fair than--L’Inconnue!