him with descriptions of the people passing in
the street; such smart shrewd pictures were they of watering-place folks
and habits, Dudley never tired of them! She was unsurpassed for the
style with which she could dress up an anecdote or a bit of gossip; and
if it verged upon the free, her French education taught her the
nice perception of the narrow line that separates "libertinage" from
indelicacy.

So far from feeling impatient at his confinement to a sofa, therefore,
Broughton affected distrust in his renovated limb for a full fortnight
after the doctor had pronounced him cured. At last he was able to drive
out, and soon afterwards to take exercise on horseback, Lydia Delmar and
her father occasionally accompanying him.

People will talk at Leamington, as they do at other places; and so
the gossips said that the rich--for he was still so reputed in the
world--the "rich" Sir Dudley Broughton was going to marry Miss Delmar.

Gossip is half-brother to that all-powerful director called "Public
Opinion;" so that when Sir Dudley heard, some half-dozen times every
day, what it was reputed he would do, he began to feel that he ought to
do it.

Accordingly, they were married; the world--at least the Leamington
section of that large body--criticising the match precisely as it struck
the interests and prejudices of the class they belonged to.

Fathers and mothers agreed in thinking that Colonel Delmar was a shrewd
old soldier, and had made an "excellent hit." Young ladies pronounced
Liddy--for a girl who had been out eight years--decidedly lucky.
Lounging men at club doors looked knowingly at each other as they joked
together in half sentences, "No affair of mine; but I did not think
Broughton would have been caught so easily." "Yes, by Jove!" cried
another, with a jockey-like style of dress, "he 'd not have made so
great a mistake on the 'Oaks' as to run an aged nag for a two-year
old!"

"I wonder he never heard of that Russian fellow!" said a third.

"Oh, yes!" sighed out a dandy, with an affected drawl; "poor dear Liddy
did indeed catch a 'Tartar '!"

Remarks such as these were the pleasant sallies the event provoked;
but so it is in higher and greater things in life! At the launch of a
line-of-battle ship, the veriest vagrant in Tags fancies he can predict
for her defeat and shipwreck!

The Broughtons were now the great people of the London season, at least
to a certain "fast" set, who loved dinners at the Cla