This new event seemed somehow to consolidate and make certain that wonderful fortune of Louis, which until then had looked almost too much like a romance to be realised. His uncle had made various efforts to question and set aside the verdict which transferred to the true heir his name and inheritance--efforts in which even the lawyers whom he had employed at the trial, and who were not over-scrupulous, had refused any share. The attempt was entirely fruitless--an insane resistance to the law, which was irresistible; and the Honourable Reginald Rivers, whom some old sycophants who came in his way still flattered with his old title, was now at Baden, a great man enough in his own circle, rich in the allowance from his nephew, which he was no longer too proud to accept. He alone of all men expressed any disapprobation of Louis’s marriage--he whose high sense of family honour revolted from the idea of a _mesalliance_--and one other individual, who had something of a more reasonable argument. We hasten to extract, according to a former promise, the following pathetic paragraph from the pages of the _Mississippi Gazette_:-- “I have just heard of the marriage of the young Lord W---- with the beautiful M---- A----. Well!--is that so wonderful? Oh, visionary dream! That thou shouldst pause to comment upon a common British bargain--the most ordinary arrangement of this conventional and rotten life? What is a heart in comparison with a title?--true love in the balance of a coronet? Oh, my country, _thou_ hast not come to this! But for these mercenary and heartless parents--but for the young mind dazzled with the splendid cheat of rank--oh heaven, what true felicity--what poetic rapture--what a home thou mightst have seen! For she was beautiful as the day when it breaks upon the rivers and the mountains of my native land! It is enough--a poet’s fate would have been all incomplete without this fiery trial. Farewell, M----! Farewell, lovely deluded victim of a false society! Some time out of your hollow splendour you will think of a true heart and weep!” CHAPTER XXXIII. AN OLD FRIEND.