the Secretaries and the Floaters of the bubble-schemes retired to the United States of America with large fortunes, and occasionally returned as Consuls-General and Ambassadors to the Continental Powers. At length it became generally known that the Duke was seriously embarrassed. He resigned office, retired to his seat in the country, and--married. The lady upon whom he fixed his choice was no other than his ward, the young Baroness Scarswicke, who at that time was barely turned eighteen years of age. She had long loved the Duke as her father’s friend, and had long admired him for his personal character, and there was a great charm in his manner when--which was seldom--he was in the company of women. Lady Scarswicke, who lived a retired life with her aunt in a somewhat remote country-house in Lancashire, had seen but few desirable young men; and when the Duke, who of course was many years her senior, proposed to her, after taking a week for the consideration of the offer, she accepted him, and never regretted she had done so. Little by little they became an extremely attached couple, but years elapsed before an heir was born to the castle and broad lands of Ribblesdale. In fact, the Duke’s first cousin, Colonel de Lacy, late of the Coldstream Guards, and now a dissipated man about town, had actually succeeded in impressing his own conviction upon the Jews--that an heir was out of the question, and that he himself would succeed to the title and estates--and had negotiated a loan in proportion to his great expectations, when the Duchess (after a winter passed in a Dahabeyeh on the Nile) astonished the world by giving birth to a son. Colonel de Lacy was furious, and there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in Jewry, when this unexpected event occurred, and this rage was increased when it was reported that the young Earl of Preston (for such was the Duke’s second title) was a strong little brat, and likely to make a considerable stay in the world he had so lately entered. Colonel de Lacy’s friends, too, like Job’s comforters as they were, represented to him that now the Duchess had once begun there was no knowing when she would stop, and they quoted, on the highest medical authority, a formidable array of cases of ladies who had not had a single child until they were forty, but who had ended by having a round dozen. Colonel de Lacy, nevertheless, refused to be comforted, and thereupon went utterly to the dogs. The Duchess, however, spite of the medical authorities, _did_ stop when the little Earl was born; and when the boy was ten years old, the Duke himself went the way of all flesh, leaving the Duchess sole guardian of his son, and heir to all his estates, until the lad should reach the age of twenty-one. Shortly after her husband’s death, the Duchess, who wished to retrench and nurse up the revenues of the estate for her son, accepted the offer made to her by Her Majesty, and came to live at Hampton Court.