. So, ladies, hasten your toilet, I beseech you."

With these words, his lordship, taking my arm, led me into the
drawing-room, where we had not been many minutes till we were joined
by her ladyship, a tall stately handsome woman, of a certain age;
resolutely bent upon being both young and beautiful, in spite of time
and wrinkles; her reception of me, though not possessing the frankness
of his lordship, was still very polite, and intended to be even
gracious. I now found by the reiterated inquiries for my old uncle, Sir
Guy, that he it was, and not Hamlet, to whom I owed my present notice,
and I must include it among my confessions, that it was about the first
advantage I ever derived from the relationship. After half an hour's
agreeable chatting, the ladies entered, and then I had time to remark
the extreme beauty of their appearance; they were both wonderfully like,
and except that Lady Jane was taller and more womanly, it would have
been almost impossible to discriminate between them.

Lady Jane Callonby was then about twenty years of age, rather above the
middle size, and slightly disposed towards embonpoint; her eye was of the
deepest and most liquid blue, and rendered apparently darker, by long
lashes of the blackest jet--for such was the colour of her hair; her nose
slightly, but slightly, deviated from the straightness of the Greek, and
her upper lip was faultless, as were her mouth and chin; the whole lower
part of the face, from the perfect "chiselling," and from the character
of her head, had certainly a great air of hauteur, but the extreme
melting softness of her eyes took from this, and when she spoke, there
was a quiet earnestness in her mild and musical voice, that disarmed you
at once of connecting the idea of self with the speaker; the word
"fascinating," more than any other I know of, conveys the effect of her
appearance, and to produce it, she had more than any other woman I ever
met, that wonderful gift, the "l'art de plaire."

I was roused from my perhaps too earnest, because unconscious gaze, at
the lovely figure before me, by his Lordship saying, "Mr. Lorrequer, her
Ladyship is waiting for you." I accordingly bowed, and, offering my arm,
led her into the dinner-room. And here I draw rein for the present,
reserving for my next chapter--My Adventure at Callonby.

CHAPTER III.

LIFE AT CALLONBY--LOVE-MAKING--MISS O'DOWD'S ADVENTURE.

My first evening at Callonby passed off as nearly