Other influences, too, came in to break the purer spell of honourable love under which Rollo, to his own surprise, had so entirely fallen. With the return of Augusta and her husband, the world seemed to have come back and seized him. Even the society of Augusta, of itself, had an immediate influence, breaking up the magic of the seclusion in which he had been content to live. Lady Caroline was not a woman who could be called unworldly, but she was passive, and did not take any initiative even in the way of gossip. She liked to hear it; there came a little gleam of interest to her eyes when the stories of the great world were brought to her, when she was told who was going to marry who, and by what schemes and artifices the marriage had been brought about; and who had most frequently and boldly broken the marriage vow, and by whom it had been most politely eluded; and how everybody lived and cheated, and nothing was as it seemed; and all that is done for money, and that is done for pleasure, in that busy, small, narrow-minded village society--which is the world. But though she loved to hear, she could not begin; for, unless people told her what was going on, how, she sometimes asked piteously, was she to know? As for the Dean, he was not in the habit of it any more than his wife, though when he went to town he would bring down invariably a piece of news from his club--of somebody’s appointment, or somebody’s good luck, or somebody’s wedding. “Now, why can’t you go and do likewise?” he would say to Rollo. But all this was mild and secondary in comparison with Augusta, who brought the very air of what Mr. Jenkins calls the Upper Ten into the Deanery, perfuming all the rooms and all the meals with stories of fortunes won and lost, of squabbles, ministerial and domestic, of marriages and dinners alike “arranged,” and all the wonderful _dessous des cartes_ and _behind the scenes_ with which so many people are acquainted in fashionable life. Who so well as Augusta knew that when the Duke of Mannering gave up his governorship, it was not from any political reason, but because the life he led was such that the place was far too hot to hold him, and Government was only too glad to send out Algy Fairfax, though he was only a younger son, and had no particular interest, simply to smooth things down? And what a lucky thing it was for Algy to be there just at the right moment, when there was nobody else handy, and just when Lord Arthur was there, who had got him to explain matters to his elder brother, and knew what he could do! It was what old Lady Fairfax had been scheming for all her life, just as she had been scheming to catch young Snellgrove for Mina. Of course she had succeeded. Mina was almost distracted, everybody knew. It was she who had that affair with Lord Colbrookdale, and now everybody said she was wildly in love with Reginald Fane, her cousin; but she might just as well be in love with St.