e play-house. What
say you, Mistress Chattesworth?'

'Ha, ha! no, truly, my lady; but you know she's unfortunate, and a
stranger, and the good people in this part of the world improve so safe
an opportunity of libelling a friendless gentlewoman.'

This little jet of vitriol was intended for the eye of the Castle beau;
but he, quite innocent of the injection, went on serenely--

'So they do, upon my honour, Madam, tell prodigious naughty tales about
her: yet upon my life I do pity her from my soul: how that fellow
Calcraft, by Jove--she says, you know, she's married to him, but we know
better--he has half broken her heart, and treated her with most refined
meanness, as I live; in the green-room, where she looks an infinity
worse than on the stage, she told me----'

'I dare say,' said Aunt Becky, rather stiffly, pulling him up; for
though she had fought a round for poor George Anne Bellamy for Mossop's
sake, she nevertheless had formed a pretty just estimate of that faded,
good-natured, and insolvent demirep, and rather recoiled from any
anecdotes of her telling.

'And Calcraft gave her his likeness in miniature,' related the
macaroni, never minding; 'set round with diamonds, and, will you
believe it? when she came to examine it, they were not brilliants, but
rose-diamonds--despicable fellow!'

Here the talk began to spring up again in different places, and the
conversation speedily turned into what we have heard it before, and the
roar and confusion became universal, and swallowed up what remained of
poor George Anne's persecutions.

CHAPTER XXIV.

IN WHICH TWO YOUNG PERSONS UNDERSTAND ONE ANOTHER BETTER, PERHAPS, THAN
EVER THEY DID BEFORE, WITHOUT SAYING SO.

And now the ladies, with their gay plumage, have flown away like foreign
birds of passage, and the jolly old priests of Bacchus, in the parlour,
make their libations of claret; and the young fellows, after a while,
seeing a gathering of painted fans, and rustling hoops, and fluttering
laces, upon the lawn, and a large immigration of hilarious neighbours
besides, and two serious fiddlers, and a black fellow with a tambourine
preparing for action, and the warm glitter of the western sun among the
green foliage about the window, could stand it no longer, but stole
away, notwithstanding a hospitable remonstrance and a protest from old
Strafford, to join the merry muster.

'The young bucks will leave their claret,' said Lord Castlemallard; 'and
trul