“Heaven forgive my conceit, it was my very wonder and delight, which caused me to find fault or fret at every small mote in my sun. But I shall not contradict or plague you more, very likely you will soon have seen the last of a lumpish, captious fellow, whose greatest merit that I can see is, that he no sooner knew you than he cast his quips and cranks, as a misanthropic sailor, to the winds, and loved you with his whole heart and soul.” “Oh, heavens! seen the last, contradict—plague! Harry, while you profess to love me, how can you speak so unkind?” CHAPTER XXI. ISLINGTON CHURCH EARLY ONE MARCH MORNING. Harry Fane was convinced of all that he had said—to the extremity of the situation which appeared to justify a violent alternative as the only refuge from their trouble. Naturally he succeeded in persuading Lady Bell, while he was not even guilty of deliberately playing upon her feelings. He was tortured with having the cup snatched from his lips—with doubt and dread, and he groaned out his torture audibly, until Lady Bell was brought to enter but a faltering futile objection to his desperate project. “How can we get married so soon, nobody knowing, your cousin away, and not a preparation made?” Nothing more easy, as the records of the generation showed, and as Lady Bell’s own recollection might have told her. Even when a public marriage would be attended with difficulties, a private marriage could be resorted to, and had been resorted to, more than once already by officers hastily bound for America. These private marriages were, according to convenience, announced shortly after the event, or allowed gradually to filter out in suspicious rumours, till the secret was no secret, by the time it was finally disclosed. Certainly Lady Bab Yelverton, the only child of the Earl of Suffolk, whose runaway match had been much talked of this season, had brought private marriages somewhat into disgrace. But then Lady Bab, by the way a mere chit of a girl, two years younger than Lady Bell, had defied parental authority in the most daring and glaring manner; Lady Bab had gone off from her father and mother’s house with Lieutenant Gould, just returned from being wounded in America, to be worse wounded by Cupid or Plutus at home. Lord Suffolk had threatened his daughter with his curse, and the cutting her off with a shilling. Lady Bab’s gross filial undutifulness was regarded as even more reprehensible than the Duchess of Leinster’s disregard for maternal obligations. The duchess, who was the widowed mother of seventeen children, as well as “the proudest, most expensive woman in town,” had thought fit to marry her eldest son’s tutor.