"I don't think your ladyship need anticipate immediate peril," said Asterley, with a significant air. "From the kind of life his lordship has been leading of late, I should think there was nothing further from his thoughts than matrimony. A young man cannot marry _two_ French dancers; and from what I know of the ladies with whom Lord Polwhele has been seen about town lately, if he marries one 'twill be at the risk of getting shot or stabbed by the other. O, I don't mean that the lady would murder him herself. She would get some serviceable Irish captain to invite him to a meeting in the Five Fields or at Wormwood Scrubs." "You have no right to talk of such things, Asterley, and in the hearing of a mother!" whimpered the Dowager. "I beg your ladyship's pardon; but when all the town knows the story--" "The town reeks with malicious inventions," said Lavendale lightly. "I daresay young Lord Polwhele is not a whit worse than his neighbours." Lady Judith leant back in her chair and listened with a supercilious air, as if she had been looking on at a gathering of ants and emmets. They sat and babbled about their acquaintances: how he or she had run mad, and how people did such monstrous stupendous things that it was strange no fiery rain came down from heaven, or inward convulsion upheaved the earth, to wreak the vengeance of the Omnipotent on this modern Sodom. Lady Judith listened, and said scarce a word. Of course the world was wicked; she had known as much from her childhood. She had heard of gambling debts and family quarrels, elopements and suicides, madness, scrofula, hereditary hatreds, and fatal duels, in her nursery. There was nothing new in the latest scandal, only another turn of the old figures in the old kaleidoscope. She heard and smiled. "My dear souls, how stale your talk is!" she said at last: "not one of your scandals has any originality. They sound as if you had adapted them from the French. They are reminiscences of the Regent and his _roués_. Confess now that they are stolen from the Philippiques." "May I show you your rooms, ladies?" said Irene, "and then we might have time for some music before supper." "O, hang music!" cried Miss Vansittart. "We have music enough in London. 'Tis nothing but talk of Cuzzoni and Faustina, Handel and Bononcini, all day long; everybody fighting for his or her favourite singer: and 'tis dangerous to confess one admires Senesino, lest one should be torn to pieces by the votaries of Farinelli. Let us clean ourselves, and then sit down to a good round game--bassett, or pharaoh." Durnford rang the bell, and the housekeeper came with a couple of maids, carrying wax candles; and the ladies gathered up their cloaks and hoods, and prepared to be ushered to their several rooms. "One word, Lavendale," cried the vivacious Dowager, wheeling suddenly on the threshold: "is there a ghost?" "There is the ghost which appeared to Saul, madam, in the twenty-seventh chapter of the first book of Samuel."