"I am Mr.Carlyle." "I have heard of you," replied her ladyship, scanning his good looks, and feeling cross that his homage should be given where she saw it was given, "but I had _not_ heard that you and Lady Isabel Vane were on the extraordinary terms of intimacy that--that----" "Madam," he interrupted as he handed a chair to her ladyship and took another himself, "we have never yet been on terms of extraordinary intimacy.

I was begging the Lady Isabel to grant that we may be; I was asking her to become my wife." The avowal was as a shower of incense to the countess, and her ill humor melted into sunshine.

It was a solution to her great difficulty, a loophole by which she might get rid of her _bete noire_, the hated Isabel.

A flush of gratification lighted her face, and she became full of graciousness to Mr.Carlyle.
"How very grateful Isabel must feel to you," quoth she.

"I speak openly, Mr.Carlyle, because I know that you were cognizant of the unprotected state in which she was left by the earl's improvidence, putting marriage for her, at any rate, a high marriage, nearly out of the question.