sent out her handmaiden to fetch them, and lit the fire herself in her devotion. This is an extent of enthusiasm to which few people would go. And Lady Jane, sweet creature, who was evidently in trouble somehow with her papa, who had sent that nice young gentleman off as fast as ever she could, that the Duke and he might not meet, poor thing! what would be so good for her as a chop? The old housekeeper betook herself to her work with the warmest sense at once of benevolence and of power--power to ameliorate and soften the hardness of destiny, and to win fame and honour to herself. What enterprise could have a finer motive? Of the three people in the house, she was the happy one, as happens not unfrequently among all the twists and entanglements of fate. Before, however, Mrs Brown had begun to cook her chops, Nurse Mordaunt, Lady Jane’s devoted attendant since her childhood, arrived in much anxiety and distress. Nurse had been detained by various matters, by Lady Germaine, and by the delay in getting her ladyship’s things, which had been left that morning at Lady Germaine’s house. With a heavy heart nurse had effaced the direction of Lady Jane Winton from the box. She had never herself approved of such a marriage any more than the Duke did. It injured her pride sadly to think of “My Lady” marrying a commoner at all, and marrying him secretly at a poky little church in the city! But that she should be married and not married, half a wife, “dragged from the altar,” was something which no one could contemplate with calmness. Nurse was more shamed, distracted, broken-hearted than any of the party. “Oh, don’t ask me,” she answered, shaking her head, when Mrs Brown humbly, with every respect, begged to know what had happened. “It is as bad as a revolution--it’s worse than the Chartists; even Radicals respect the marriage vow,” nurse cried in her dismay. “I don’t approve of it, and never did, and never will. Up to the church door I’d have done anything to stop it. But bless us! if you don’t keep the altar sacred, what have you got to trust to?” She caused the boxes to be brought into the hall with their erased addresses. There was nobody to carry them anywhere,--none of the attendance about to which Mrs Mordaunt was accustomed. “Fetch one of the men,” she had said at first, but then she remembered there was no man in Grosvenor Square at this time of the year. “Drat it! as if things were not bad enough already; no servants, no comfort, nobody but Mrs Brown to look to everything!” Mrs Mordaunt was too much broken down to go to her young lady at once. She condescended to go into the kitchen, where it was at least warm, to eat one of the chops and to rest a little before she went up-stairs. And her arrival was scarcely over before it was followed by another more urgent and important. The old housekeeper almost fainted when, opening the door in answer to the impatient summons of another arrival, she saw the Duchess herself get out of a hackney-cab. “Bless