CHAPTER XVII.
"THERE is nothing but meeting and parting in this world!" and you may be sure the incongruous personages of our tale could not long be together.
Their separate paths had met for an instant in one focus, furnished then and there the matter of an eccentric story, and then diverged forever.
Our lives have a general current, and also an episode or two; and the episodes of a commonplace life are often rather startling; in like manner this tale is not a specimen, but an episode of Lord Ipsden and Lady Barbara, who soon after this married and lived like the rest of the _beau monde._ In so doing, they passed out of my hands; such as wish to know how viscounts and viscountesses feed and sleep, and do the domestic (so called), and the social (so called), are referred to the fashionable novel.

To Mr.Saunders, for instance, who has in the press one of those cerberus-leviathans of fiction, so common now; incredible as folio to future ages.

Saunders will take you by the hand, and lead you over carpets two inches thick--under rosy curtains--to dinner-tables.

He will _fete_ you, and opera you, and dazzle your young imagination with _e'p'ergnes,_ and salvers, and buhl and ormolu.

No fishwives or painters shall intrude upon his polished scenes; all shall be as genteel as himself.