At the period when our story commences, Lord and Lady Westhope had been married sixteen years. Theirs had been a love-match. The love had lasted on the part of the lady at least seven years and three months; but on that of her lord not quite seven months and three weeks, from the wedding-day. Lord Westhope had then been thrown with the handsome but designing Lady Bassingham, who made an easy conquest of his heart; which conquest she retained till the rustic bloom of Lucy Meadows, his wife's new maid, eclipsed the somewhat faded charms of the lady of fashion. When weary of Lucy Meadows, he became deeply smitten with the Honourable Miss Asterby, the young beauty of the day, who indulged her vanity in listening to the compliments of a married man, and allowed him to monopolise more of her conversation than was either judicious, or prudent. To these succeeded another and another object, selected from every rank and condition of life. During the six years, seven months, and one week, which Lady Westhope's love survived that of her husband, she had undergone tortures of jealousy, anger, indignation, and mortification. At the end of this time she made up her mind to her fate, and bore his infidelities with tolerable composure. Henceforward their domestic life was very peaceable. The wife no longer reproached and wept; and the husband was exceedingly gay and good-humoured. But now began trials of another sort to Lady Westhope. She was extremely handsome: her beauty was of a sort to be more striking at twenty-five, than at eighteen. Her husband was known to be faithless--she was soon found to be indifferent. All vain and idle young men consequently aspired to her favour. It need not be added, that the number was prodigious! But though she had been disappointed in her hopes of being loved, she resolved to pass through life admired and respected. She would set the world the example of a beautiful and neglected wife, defying the breath of slander, repressing every sign of admiration, and pursuing her course uncontaminated by the profligacy around her. A word, a look of encouragement, would have brought any of these aspiring youths to sigh at her feet; but on none did she deign to bestow a glance--firmly and calmly did she check the first symptom of preference which might be evinced towards her. She was not blessed with children, but she had many female friends; and to her cousin, Lady Blanche De Vaux, she was warmly attached. Lady Blanche was fifteen years younger than herself, and her affection for her young cousin combined something of a maternal character, with the ease and companionship of two women who were both in the perfection of womanhood; for Lady Westhope at thirty-four had scarcely lost any of her beauty, and Lady Blanche at nineteen was in the fulness of hers.