s people still said that he had obtained the heart,--of the
Lady Glencora M'Cluskie. But sundry mighty magnates, driven almost
to despair at the prospect of such a sacrifice, had sagaciously put
their heads together, and the result had been that the Lady Glencora
had heard reason. She had listened,--with many haughty tossings
indeed of her proud little head, with many throbbings of her
passionate young heart; but in the end she listened and heard reason.
She saw Burgo, for the last time, and told him that she was the
promised bride of Plantagenet Palliser, nephew and heir of the Duke
of Omnium.

He had borne it like a man,--never having groaned openly, or quivered
once before any comrade at the name of the Lady Glencora. She had
married Mr Palliser at St George's Square, and on the morning of the
marriage he had hung about his club door in Pall Mall, listening to
the bells, and saying a word or two about the wedding, with admirable
courage. It had been for him a great chance,--and he had lost it.
Who can say, too, that his only regret was for the money? He had
spoken once of it to a married sister of his, in whose house he had
first met Lady Glencora. "I shall never marry now,--that is all," he
said--and then he went about, living his old reckless life, with the
same recklessness as ever. He was one of those young men with dark
hair and blue eyes,--who wear no beard, and are certainly among
the handsomest of all God's creatures. No more handsome man than
Burgo Fitzgerald lived in his days; and this merit at any rate was
his,--that he thought nothing of his own beauty. But he lived ever
without conscience, without purpose,--with no idea that it behoved
him as a man to do anything but eat and drink,--or ride well to
hounds till some poor brute, much nobler than himself, perished
beneath him.

He chiefly concerns our story at this present time because the Lady
Glencora who had loved him,--and would have married him had not those
sagacious heads prevented it,--was a cousin of Alice Vavasor's. She
was among those very great relations with whom Alice was connected by
her mother's side,--being indeed so near to Lady Macleod, that she
was first cousin to that lady, only once removed. Lady Midlothian was
aunt to the Lady Glencora, and our Alice might have called cousins,
and not been forbidden, with the old Lord of the Isles, Lady
Glencora's father,--who was dead, however, some time previous to that
affair with Burgo,--and wi