As the clock struck the half-hour, forming the _juste milieu_ between seven and eight, post meridiem, the goodly company assembled in Lady Lombard’s drawing-room, being warned by the portly butler that dinner was served, paired off and betook themselves two by two (like the animals coming out of Noah’s Ark, as represented on the dissecting puzzles of childhood) to the lofty dining-room, where much English good cheer, disguised under absurd French names, awaited them. During the short time that Bracy had been in the house he had not been altogether idle. He first took an opportunity of informing Lady Lombard that De Grandeville was directly descended from Charlemagne, and that he was only waiting till the death of an opulent relative should render him independent of his profession to revive a dormant peerage, when it was generally supposed his colossal intellect and unparalleled legal acumen would render him political leader of the House of Lords; he then congratulated her on her good fortune in having secured the presence of this illustrious individual, who, he assured her, was in such request amongst the aristocracy of the kingdom that he was scarcely ever to be found disengaged, and wound up by running glibly through a long list of noble names with whom he declared the mighty Marmaduke to be hand and glove. Accordingly, good Lady Lombard, believing it all faithfully, mentally elected De Grandeville to the post of honour at her right hand, deposing for the purpose no less a personage than General Gudgeon. When we say no less a personage, we speak advisedly, for that gallant officer, weighing sixteen stone without his snuff-box, and being fully six feet high, was, if not exactly “a Triton amongst minnows,” at all events a Goliath amongst gudgeons, which we conceive to be much the same thing. Having achieved his object of placing De Grandeville in exactly the position he wished him to occupy, Bracy next proceeded to frustrate a scheme which he perceived the fair Susanna (who was his pet antipathy) to have originated for the amatory subjugation and matrimonial acquisition of John Dace Dackerel Dace, Esq., of Roachpool, in the West Riding. The aforesaid John D. D. had a weakness bordering indeed on a mental hallucination; he fancied he was born to be a popular author--“to go down to posterity upon the tongues of men,” as he himself was wont to express it--and the way in which he attempted to fulfil his exalted destiny and effect the wished-for transit, _viâ_ these unruly members of his fellow-mortals, was by writing mild, dull articles, signed J. D. D., and sending them to the editors of various magazines, by whom they were always unhesitatingly rejected.