Were we writing a drama instead of a true history, we might like to linger for a few moments on the leave-taking between the Princess and Sir Horace Upton. They were indeed both consummate “artists,” and they played their parts to perfection,--not as we see high comedy performed on the stage, by those who grotesque its refinements and exaggerate its dignity; “lashing to storm” the calm and placid lake, all whose convulsive throes are many a fathom deep, and whose wildest workings never bring a ripple to the surface. No, theirs was the true version of well-bred “performance.” A little well-affected grief at separation, brief as it was meant to be; a little half-expressed surprise, on the lady's part, at the suddenness of the departure; a little, just as vaguely conveyed, complaint on the other side, over the severe requirements of duty, and a very little tenderness--for there was no one to witness it--at the thought of parting; and with a kiss upon her hand, whose respectful courtesy no knight-errant of old could have surpassed, Sir Horace backed from the “presence,” sighed, and slipped away. Had our reader been a spectator instead of a peruser of the events we have lately detailed, he might have fancied, from certain small asperities of manner, certain quicknesses of reproof and readiness at rejoinder, that here were two people only waiting for a reasonable and decent pretext to go on their separate roads in life. Yet nothing of this kind was the case; the bond between them was not affection, it was simply convenience. Their partnership gave them a strength and a social solvency which would have been sorely damaged had either retired from “the firm;” and they knew it. What would the Princess's dinners have been without the polished ease of him who felt himself half the host? What would all Sir Horace Upton's subtlety avail him, if it were not that he had sources of information which always laid open the game of his adversaries? Singly, each would have had a tough struggle with the world; together, they were more than a match for it. The highest order of diplomatist, in the estimation of Upton, was the man who, at once, knew what was _possible_ to be done. It was his own peculiar quality to possess this gift; but great as his natural acuteness was, it would not have availed him, without those secret springs of intelligence we have alluded to. There is no saying to what limit he might not have carried this faculty, had it not been that one deteriorating and detracting feature marred and disfigured the fairest form of his mind.