The ladies of the family, the two aunts, had affected to disbelieve the paragraph which Lady Fitzwarren had shown them with so much triumph. The rector had declared that it was just the kind of thing that he had expected. Aunt Julia, speaking freely, had said that it was just the kind of thing which she, knowing the girl, could not believe. Then the rector had come up to town to hear the trial, and on the day preceding it had asked his nephew as to the truth of the rumour which had reached him. "It is true," said the young lord, knitting his brow, "but it had better not be talked about." "Why not talked about? All the world knows it. It has been in the newspapers." "Any one wishing to oblige me will not mention it," said the Earl. This was too bad. It could not be possible,--for the honour of all the Lovels it could not surely be possible,--that Lord Lovel was still seeking the hand of a young woman who had confessed that she was engaged to marry a journeyman tailor! And yet to him, the uncle,--to him who had not long since been in loco parentis to the lord,--the lord would vouchsafe no further reply than that above given! The rector almost made himself believe that, great as might be the sorrow caused by such disruption, it would become his duty to quarrel with the head of his family! He listened with most attentive ears to every word spoken by the Solicitor-General, and quarrelled with almost every word. Would not any one have imagined that this advocate had been paid to plead the cause, not of the Earl, but of the Countess? As regarded the interests of the Earl, everything was surrendered. Appeal was made for the sympathies of all the court,--and, through the newspapers, for the sympathies of all England,--not on behalf of the Earl who was being defrauded of his rights, but on behalf of the young woman who had disgraced the name which she pretended to call her own,--and whose only refuge from that disgrace must be in the fact that to that name she had no righteous claim! Even when this apostate barrister came to a recapitulation of the property at stake, and explained the cause of its being vested, not in land as is now the case with the bulk of the possessions of noble lords,--but in shares and funds and ventures of commercial speculation here and there, after the fashion of tradesmen,--he said not a word to stir up in the minds of the jury a feeling of the injury which had been done to the present Earl. "Only that I am told that he has a wife of his own I should think that he meant to marry one of the women himself," said the indignant rector in the letter which he wrote to his sister Julia.