"I am delighted to hear you say so. Lord Osbalston asked me for the same day--but Mariné, you know, lives with Doveton now, and he could always turn the scale with me" (laughing affectedly); "_Apropos_, might I venture to ask the honour of your partaking of my rustic fare? I am living, you know, quite _en garçon_; but it would be a variety, so different from all you meet elsewhere; so very plain, and so very humble; and you would of course do me the honour to name your own party. Might I hope that you too, Comtesse, would condescend so far?" This was the boldest step Sir William Temple had yet taken; and he stood in proportionate anxiety, breathless and red, awaiting a reply which was to confirm or crush his hopes. May be, like a second Cæsar, he felt that he had crossed the limits of the empire, and saw that victory only could retrieve what he had hazarded, and that he must rise or fall by that. If victory did attend him, then, like another Alexander, he might weep for fresh worlds to conquer; but if he fell,--"oh! what a fall was there, my friends!" Such feelings, no doubt, did agitate his swelling breast when he saw the interchange of looks pass between Lady Tilney and her friend, as if they questioned each other. "Shall we gratify this man?" (this fool he would have read, could he have interpreted the Countess Leinsengen's expression): "shall we countenance him?" and in the tremendous moment of suspense Sir William blest his stars that there were none by to mark him. But when the joyful sound of Lady Tilney's voice pronounced an acceptance of his petition, he would have given every thing, short of the promised honour itself, that the whole Opera house had been present to witness his triumph. "You will receive us _en garçon_, Sir William, dat will be very good," said the Comtesse Leinsengen: "all I bargain for is dat there should be no misses--dose unmarried women are always in de way." Sir William was too much intoxicated with joy--too much absorbed with the prospect of his increasing consequence in the eyes of the fashionable world, when it should be announced that he had entertained the Comtesse Leinsengen, Lady Tilney, and a party of distinguished personages to dinner, at his house in May Fair, to pay attention to any thing not immediately connected with the results which that dinner would produce. He had heard not one word distinctly beyond the promised acceptance of his invitation; although he continued mechanically to reply, whenever he imagined himself addressed. "I am so glad to hear you say so!--I am delighted to hear that!" At last, on recovering a little, he perceived that Lady Tilney and her friend had entered into an argument on the subject of the unmarried ladies, to whom the Comtesse had alluded, and in which his dinner seemed entirely forgotten, or likely to be so.