ildly as
when the herald's trumpet blew the announcement for the world to hear
out of Wales.

He had observed, that the young woman supervising was deficient in
the ease of an established superior; her brows were troubled; she
was, therefore, a lieutenant elevated from a lower grade; and, to his
thinking, conducted the business during the temporary retirement of the
mistress of the shop.

And the mistress of the shop?

The question hardly needs be put.

Rose Mackrell or his humour answered it in unfaltering terms.

London heard, with the variety of feelings which are indistinguishable
under a flooding amazement, that the beautiful new fruit and flower shop
had been purchased and stocked by the fabulously wealthy young Earl of
Fleetwood, to give his Whitechapel Countess a taste for business, an
occupation, and an honourable means of livelihood.

There was, Dame Gossip thumps to say, a general belief in this report.
Crowds were on the pavement, peering through the shop-windows. Carriages
driving by stopped to look. My lord himself had been visible, displaying
his array of provisions to friends. Nor was credulity damped appreciably
when over the shop, in gold letters, appeared the name of Sarah Winch.
It might be the countess's maiden name, if she really was a married
countess.

But, in truth, the better informed of the town, having begun to think
its Croesus capable of any eccentricity, chose to believe. They were at
the pitch of excitement which demands and will swallow a succession of
wilder extravagances. To accelerate the delirium of the fun, nothing
was too much, because any absurdity was anticipated. And the earl's
readiness to be complimented on the shop's particular merits, his
gratified air at an allusion to it, whirled the fun faster. He seemed
entirely unconscious that each step he now took wakened peals.

For such is the fate of a man who has come to be dogged by the humourist
for the provision he furnishes; and, as it happens, he is the more
laughable if not in himself a laughable object. The earl's handsome
figure, fine style, and contrasting sobriety heightened the burlesque
of his call to admiration of a shop where Whitechapel would sit in
state-according to the fiction so closely under the lee of fact that
they were not strictly divisible. Moreover, Sarah Winch, whom Chumley
Potts drew into conversation, said, he vowed, she came up West from
Whitechapel. She said it a little nervously, but witho