“My dear creature,—forgive me; my best Lady Bell,” Sir George corrected himself, “the midges have been highly honoured, even before you condescended to pity them. They have more than served their purpose,—they have helped to furnish an illusion for us, that this February day by the calendar, is in the merry month of May by our experience, and that Hampton is Arcady. Now, here we are past Chelsea, fast coming back to the coarse dissipation of the garish town and the cold winds of March; what should remain to the midges, but to be swept aside with the illusion?” Lady Bell turned away her head and shut her eyes for a moment, she did not wish to see even the midges swept aside. She did not like the philosophy of which she and hers formed always the centre. She had not consented to view life as a rainbow-hued but hollow mockery, a mere series of convenient, spangled illusions. CHAPTER XIII. A VISIT TO LEICESTER FIELDS. Captain Fane, of his own free will, would not have paid another visit to Cleveland Court, before he returned to his ship. So far as it rested with him, he had made up his mind—a great deal too tartly for perfect indifference—to have nothing more to do with fine ladies, and to turn his back on fine ladies’ entertainers, so long as they were cumbered with such troublesome guests. But Captain Fane had business with Sir Peter, who was, indeed, about to appoint Harry Fane one of the guardians to his young son, and so punctilious and conscientious a young man as Harry Fane could not see it his duty to renounce this trust because circumstances had rendered it distasteful to him. Thus it happened, that while Captain Fane felt scandalised by the manner in which Lady Bell Trevor had suffered herself to float doubly with the tide, in the water-party, while he kept telling himself caustically that he need not have expected anything else, and continued setting his face, more like a flint than ever, against fashionable frivolity and levity—he yet found himself on the steps of Sir Peter Sundon’s house. And at that moment Lady Bell, attended by her maid, tripped out in her calèche and with her hands clasped in her muff, clearly starting on an expedition. Lady Bell distanced and dumbfounded Captain Fane, who was unfamiliar with the changes of mind and revolutions in tactics of even the staidest and most demure of womankind. She stopped him as he was about to pass her with a formally low bow, by holding out a friendly little hand, and bestowing on him the unsolicited information, that she was bound for the great painter in Leicester Fields, who had made so fine a picture of Commodore Keppel. She was not a sitter herself, but she had made interest to see the paintings which Sir Joshua Reynolds had on hand. She knew that she should never be able to look upon her daubs after this morning, but, woman-like, she must go and meet her fate, though it were her demolition.