"Then you got a most deliberate and atrocious fabrication, for I suppose you mean the report of my marriage to his sister, and I beg you will contradict it most emphatically whenever you hear it," said I, very stiffly. And I walked on into the House, leaving Grandon more petrified than the two little toadies I had snubbed. I can generally listen to Gladstone when he is engaged in keeping the House in suspense over the results of his arithmetical calculations; but the relative merits of a reduction of the tax on tea and on malt fell flat on my ears that evening, and even the consideration of twopence in the pound off the income-tax failed to exercise that soothing influence on my mind which it seemed to produce on those around. I looked in vain for Grandon; his accustomed seat remained empty, and I felt deeply penitent and miserable. What is there in my nature that prompts me, when I am trying to act honestly and nobly, to be impracticable and perverse? Grandon could not know the extent of the complication in which I am involved, and was right in saying what he did; yet I could no more at the moment help resenting it as I did, than a man in a passion who is struck can help returning the blow. Then the fertility and readiness of invention which the demon of perverseness that haunts me invariably displays, fairly puzzles me. And you too, I thought, as I looked up and saw little Scraper whispering eagerly to Dick Helter, who was regarding me with a bewildered look, quite unconscious that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had become poetical in regard to rags, and was announcing that we were about "To serve as model for the mighty world, And be the fair beginning of a time," --"ah," thought I, as I gazed on that brilliant and ingenious orator, "he is the only man in the House, who, if he was in such a mess as I am, would find a way out of it." My first impulse on the following morning, before going to Grosvenor Square, was to go and apologise to Grandon; and I had an additional reason for doing so after reading the following paragraph in the 'Morning Post':-- "The Earl and Countess of Whitechapel had the honour of entertaining at dinner last night the Marquess and Marchioness of Scilly, the Countess (Dowager) of Broadhem, the Earl of Broadhem and Lady Ursula Newlyte, Mr and Lady Jane Helter, Lord Grandon, the Honourable Spiffington Goldtip, and Mr Scraper."