"Nothing of any moment. There has been a dead level of stagnation in Jacobite plots since the great conspiracy four years ago, when Bishop Atterbury was sent to prison, and when the Irish priest Neynoe let himself down from a two-story window by a rope of bed-clothes, leapt into the Thames, and escaped the hangman by the less discreditable fate of a watery grave. It was somewhat strange that those two arch-plotters, his Grace of Rochester and Harry St. John, should meet and cross each other at Calais, one going into exile, and t'other returning from it. Since that famous explosion of ill-directed zeal we have had nothing worth talking about in the way of plots, though you may be sure neither his Grace of Rochester nor my Lord Bolingbroke has been idle, and that the Channel between them has been crossed pretty often by letters from the Pretender's friends." "And for domestic news?" asked Lavendale. "Leave this great chessboard, upon which princes, bishops, and Cabinet Ministers are trying to over-reach and countermarch each other, and tell us of that little world of pleasure and fashion in which we are really interested." "There is not much stirring, except that Lady Polwhele has at last thrown off Captain Asterley. She allowed him to marry a rich tallow-chandler's daughter, upon the strict understanding that he was to ill-treat or at least neglect his wife. The tallow-chandler's daughter was young and pretty, wore her own teeth and her own hair; and Asterley was so perverse as to get fond of her, broke several appointments with her ladyship, and was foolish enough to boast of his wife's approaching maternity, which Lady Polwhele considered a premeditated insult to herself. They quarrelled, the Countess was vehement to hysteria, and Asterley appeared next day with a scratched face. A fine Angora tom-cat of her ladyship's, seeing his mistress in hysterics, and fancying her aggrieved, had flown at the supposed assailant, and clawed him from temple to chin. So the story goes: but if ever human nails tore human countenance, those talons which clawed Asterley grew at the roseate tips of Lady Polwhele's taper fingers." "It is like you and the town to say so," said Durnford, laughing. "I grant that the town and I always think the worst of everybody; and that is why we are generally right. By the bye, I suppose you have heard that Lady Judith and her elderly Croesus have been falling out?" "Indeed!" said Lavendale, interested in a moment. "Was it about a lover?"