child!" said Lady St Julians to Lady Joan, "you have no idea
how unhappy Frederick is this evening, but he cannot leave the House,
and I fear it will be a late affair."

Lady Joan looked as if the absence or presence of Frederick was to her
a matter of great indifference, and then she added, "I do not think the
division so important as is generally imagined. A defeat upon a question
of colonial government does not appear to me of sufficient weight to
dissolve a cabinet."

"Any defeat will do that now," said Lady St Julians, "but to tell you
the truth I am not very sanguine. Lady Deloraine says they will be beat:
she says the radicals will desert them; but I am not so sure. Why should
the radicals desert them? And what have we done for the radicals? Had we
indeed foreseen this Jamaica business, and asked some of them to dinner,
or given a ball or two to their wives and daughters! I am sure if I had
had the least idea that we had so good a chance of coming in, I should
not have cared myself to have done something; even to have invited their
women."

"But you are such a capital partisan, Lady St Julians," said the Duke of
Fitz-Aquitaine, who with the viceroyalty of Ireland dexterously
dangled before his eyes for the last two years, had become a thorough
conservative and had almost as much confidence in Sir Robert as in Lord
Stanley.

"I have made great sacrifices," said Lady St Julians. "I went once and
stayed a week at Lady Jenny Spinner's to gain her looby of a son and his
eighty thousand a-year, and Lord St Julians proposed him at White's; and
then after all the whigs made him a peer! They certainly make more of
their social influences than we do. That affair of that Mr Trenchard was
a blow. Losing a vote at such a critical time, when if I had had only
a remote idea of what was passing through his mind, I would have even
asked him to Barrowley for a couple of days."

A foreign diplomatist of distinction had pinned Lord Marney, and was
dexterously pumping him as to the probable future.

"But is the pear ripe?" said the diplomatist.

"The pear is ripe if we have courage to pluck it," said Lord Marney;
"but our fellows have no pluck."

"But do you think that the Duke of Wellington--" and here the
diplomatist stopped and looked up in Lord Marney's face, as if he would
convey something that he would not venture to express.

"Here he is," said Lord Marney, "he will answer the question himself."

Lord Deloraine and