t Bluestone."

"How do you know that they will withdraw? Supposing at the last
moment Lady Anna were to decline the alliance, would they withdraw
then? Not a bit of it. The matter would be further delayed, and
referred over to next year. You and your daughter would be kept out
of your money, and there would still be danger."

"I should not care for that;--if they were married."

"And they have set up this Italian countess,--who never was a
countess,--any more than I am. Now they have put her up, they are
bound to dispose of her. If she came forward afterwards, on her own
behalf, where would you all be then?"

"My daughter would, at any rate, be safe."

The Serjeant did not like it at all. He felt that he was being thrown
over, not only by his client the Countess,--as to which he might
have been indifferent, knowing that the world at large, the laity as
distinguished from the lawyers, the children of the world as all who
were not lawyers seemed to him to be, will do and must be expected to
do, foolish things continually. They cannot be persuaded to subject
themselves to lawyers in all their doings, and, of course, go wrong
when they do not do so. The infinite simplicity and silliness of
mankind and womankind at large were too well known to the Serjeant to
cause him dismay, let them be shown in ever so egregious a fashion.
But in this case the fault came from another lawyer, who had tampered
with his clients, and who seemed to be himself as ignorant as
though he belonged to the outside world. And this man had been made
Solicitor-General,--over the heads of half the profession,--simply
because he could make a speech in Parliament!

But the Solicitor-General was himself becoming uneasy when at the end
of a fortnight he learned that the young people,--as he had come to
call them on all occasions,--had not as yet seen each other. He would
not like to have it said of him that he had thrown over his client.
And there were some who still believed that the Italian marriage
had been a real marriage, and the Italian wife alive at the time of
the Cumberland marriage,--though the Italian woman now living had
never been the countess. Mr. Hardy so believed, and, in his private
opinion, thought that the Solicitor-General had been very indiscreet.

"I don't think that we could ever dare to face a jury," said Sir
William to Mr. Hardy when they discussed the matter, about a
fortnight after the proposition had been made.

"Why did