It is more sad to say that, as time went by, certain metaphysical doubts as to the objective reality of the Cascadegli and the Siberian mine began to obtrude themselves. Faith of the most stubborn description remained to him, so far as the countess’s Paris salon and her beautiful self was concerned, but he failed to see the necessary connection between Trouville, Baden-Baden, Italia Irredenta, and the Parisian police. And Serge had removed himself, for an encumbrance, in a singularly accommodating way. But May was a man of his word; and he looked forward, at first eagerly, and afterward with mingled emotions, to their promised next meeting in Brookline, Mass. The woman Byron might have married was not the wife for Talleyrand. And May’s volcanic or Byronic age had passed, and he was in the tertiary period. Taking her for all she said she was, she wouldn’t do in society, and he doubted that she was all she said she was. However, it gave him no serious trouble until after his acquaintance with the beautiful Mrs. Terwilliger Dehon. Youth has a long future ahead of it, and a young man of twenty-seven easily discounts obligations maturing only in six years. But when May was thirty, and well launched in London society--whether it was the charms of Mrs. Dehon aforesaid, or the vanishing of youthful heroism and that increase of comfort which attends middle life--a political heroine like the Countess Polacca de Valska no longer seemed to him the ideal consort for a man of his temperament. Young men have their time for falling in love with comédiennes upon the stage; and then they turn to the comédiennes of real life. Only in the latter case it is to be noted that they ever prefer the heroines of a tragedy. It was on the very evening before all advice became superfluous, that he confided his troubles to Tom Leigh, and asked his advice. Tom Leigh advised him that “he was in a devil of a hole.” “But what am I to do?” said May. “I am bound to meet her--in five years.” “Perhaps she won’t come,” said Tom. But Austin shook his head. If she didn’t come, there was May Austin--but he checked himself. He had never spoken of his cousin to Tom Leigh. She was doubtless married ere this; and if she wasn’t, he preferred her to the countess. “Perhaps her husband ain’t dead,” suggested the resourceful Tom. But May smiled, bitterly. “I guess he’s dead enough--much as ever he was.” “Then I don’t see but what you’ll have to stand the breach of promise suit,” Tom concluded, with a grin. In these misfortunes, truly, there is something pleasant to our best friends. We know that Messrs. Winkle and Tupman must have chuckled in secret over even Bardell vs. Pickwick. But the idea was unspeakably awful to our fastidious hero. Moreover, he darkly imagined that the countess had other resources than a breach of promise suit.