ife."

I have heard that however honorable my father's intentions thus
proclaimed themselves, the Duchess only could see a very lamentable
_mesalliance_ in such a union; nor did she altogether disguise from my
father that his Royal Highness was very likely to take the same view of
the matter. Mademoiselle's mother was of the best blood of France,
and illegitimacy signified little if Royalty but bore its share of the
shame. Fortunately the young lady's scruples were more easily disposed
of: perhaps my father understood better how to deal with them; at all
events, one thing is certain, Madame de Sargance left Dover for
Calais on the same day that my father and his young bride started for
London,--perhaps it might be exaggeration to say the happiest, but it is
no extravagance to call them--as handsome a pair as ever journeyed the
same road on the same errand. I have told some things in this episode
which, perhaps, second thoughts would expunge, and I have omitted others
that as probably the reader might naturally have looked for. But the
truth is, the narrative has not been without its difficulties. I have
had to speak of a tone of manners and habits now happily bygone, of
which I dare not mark my reprehension with all the freedom I could wish,
since one of the chief actors was my father,--its victim, my mother.

CHAPTER II. THE ILLUSTRATION OF AN ADAGE

"Marry in haste," says the adage, and we all know what occupation
leisure will bring with it; unhappily, my father was not to prove the
exception to the maxim. It was not that his wife was wanting in any
quality which can render married life happy; she was, on the contrary,
most rarely gifted with them all. She was young, beautiful, endowed with
excellent health and the very best of tempers. The charm of her manner
won every class with whom she came into contact. But--alas that
there should be a but!--she had been brought up in habits of the most
expensive kind. Living in royal palaces, waited on by troops of menials,
with costly equipages and splendid retinues ever at her command, only
mingling with those whose lives were devoted to pleasure and amusement,
conversant with no other themes than those which bore upon gayety and
dissipation, she was peculiarly unsuited to the wear and tear of a
social system which demanded fully as much of self-sacrifice as of
enjoyment. The long lessons my father would read to her of deference
to this one, patient endurance of that,