Who or what was this sailor, that he should roughly rend social veils, tear asunder well-bred illusions, and sit in judgment on his fellow-creatures, whose fearful stumbling-blocks and torturing temptations he could never fathom? Lady Bell would have nothing more to say to Captain Fane. She bestowed her entire regard on Sir George and Mrs. Lascelles. When the party landed and walked up to Hampton Court, Lady Bell went with her particular allies without looking over her shoulder. She suffered them to lead her through the rooms which ambition, in its ostentation and prodigality, had built, and she lingered especially in the “Beauty-room.” She made as if she were absorbed by the meretricious, un-English seeming beauties, and the unedifying traditions which they had left behind them in the gossip of Gramont, quoted aptly and with adroit reticence by Sir George. She paid no heed on this occasion to the Dutch garden, the long alleys, the goodly boughs, the bridge across the river, with the pure blue sky over all—she treated these as if they might be left out of the count, and as if they did not deserve her notice. But Sir George took her into the “Maze,” and it was on Sir George that she called, when she was weary of bewilderment, to unravel the labyrinth, and find her a mode of exit. Sir George finally conducted Lady Bell to the village inn, where the party were to dine, and seated her at the head of the table, in the rustic tea-room, as the queen of the feast. Lady Bell allowed the particularity of this homage. She received it all—either as if she were indifferent to what it ought to tend, or as if she had never heard that Sir George was a notorious breaker of women’s hearts, a hardened Lothario, whose wings no woman had been able to clip, though he had been fluttering round women from his whelpdom to his somewhat jaded prime of puppydom. In that prime Sir George was still slightly Harry Fane’s junior, while Sir George was far nearer an Adonis by nature, with every personal point immeasurably better brought out by art. But though Sir George had not faced a bronzing climate or a battering service, the high-pressure atmosphere of fashionable dissipation in which he had flourished, was more telling than either alternative. In spite of his baptismal register, Sir George in all his elegance looked not half so fresh and hardly so young as Captain Fane. Manliness took some indemnification, but such indemnification has not always been valued. There have been women to whom such a world-worn hero as Sir George is irresistibly attractive. There are women to this day, if their qualified annalists do not lie, who prize such a reputation as Sir George Waring’s.