"By Jove!" said Lord Dollamore, when he had gotten rid of Mitford and was safe in his own room, "it was a lucky thing Buttons made his appearance just when he did. I should have hopelessly committed myself in another minute; and then, on the top of that fine piece of sentiment, we should have had the scene of this evening's news. No matter how she had taken it, I should have been in an awful scrape. If she had taken it well, I should have had to do a frightful amount of sympathy and condolence--the regular 'water-cart business' in fact; and if she had taken it ill, egad, she's just the woman to blurt it all out in a fit of conscience, and to believe that her father's death is a judgment upon her for not showing me up to Mitford! As it is, the matter remains in a highly-satisfactory condition; I am not committed to anything: I might have been pleading my own cause, or a friend's, or some wholly imaginary personage's; and I can either resume the argument precisely where I dropped it, if I think proper, or I can cut the whole affair. Bless you, my Buttons!" As Georgie was driving over to the railway-station on the following day,--her maid and she occupying the inside of the carriage, and Sir Charles, availing himself of his well-known objection to allow any one but himself to drive when he was present, to avoid a _tête-à-tête_ with his wife, on the box,--she raised her heavy veil for a while, and drawing a letter from her pocket, read and re-read it through her blinding tears. It was from Colonel Alsager. At length Georgie put it away, and lay back in the carriage, with closed eyes, thinking of the writer. "He has suffered a great deal also," she thought; "and he has more to suffer. How sorely he must repent his neglect of his father! as sorely as I repent my neglect of mine." Here the tears, which had already burned her eyelids into a state of excruciating soreness, burst forth again. "What must he have felt when he read his father's letter!--the letter written to be read after the writer's death,--the letter he will show to me, he says, though to no one else in the world, except, I suppose, the young lady whom Sir Peregrine entreated him in it to marry. I wonder if he will,--I wonder if she is nice, and good, and likely to make him happy! It is strange that a similar calamity should have befallen him and me. He can feel for my grief now--I have always felt for his!" CHAPTER XXVI. MR. WUFF'S "NEW STAR."