Despite the commercial storm, in face of all those wonderful contrivances of bridge and rail to ease the traffic, London was as full of life and gaiety and pomp and glitter and show, this third London season of the Countess of Verner, as ever it had been before. We shall leave her ladyship in the midst of the whirl of pomp and pleasure, one of the queens of beauty. She has been kissed by our gracious Queen; she has excited the envy of many a titled dame. She has had many an admiring eye upon her amongst crowds of smiling courtiers. She has reached the highest point of her ambition, and in the foremost rank of the first society in Europe; her husband has made a great speech in the House of Lords; she is still declared to be the most beautiful woman of this gorgeous London season. Their West End house is filled with all the leading people of the time; the Verners are the rage,--the Countess is the one bright particular star in the aristocratic atmosphere of the period. And here we leave her looking her best; heightened are all those charms which once attracted Lionel Hammerton, and will live in his memory, like the sound of falling water to the traveller who has sunk down maimed and athirst, unable to taste the cooling stream which goes rippling and smiling on, and chattering over the rocks as if it mocked him. We leave Lord Verner, supremely happy in his married life, blissfully ignorant of the narrow escape which that happiness has had of shipwreck; blissfully ignorant, like the mariner, of the shoals and quicksands which have endangered his vessel in the fog and darkness. We leave our Countess in the full light of fashion’s splendours, and still bent on the performance of her duty in the high station to which she has been exalted. If we were writing a mere book of fiction, and not a true story of life, Lord Verner would probably have died conveniently towards the end of the story, that Lionel Hammerton might, in defiance of law and order and everything else, have married his widow, the twain ending their days by some lake of Como, where the perfumed light steals through the mist of alabaster lamps, and the law is not too stringent anent matrimonial license; but, as this is a matter-of-fact history, Lord Verner does not die for the purpose of rewarding his brother’s stupidity with a wife and a title. Nay, more, that title has slipped away from Lionel Hammerton for ever.