.

IN WHICH WE HAVE TO SEE IN THE DARK.
So ends the fourth act of our comedy.
After all her heroism and extraordinary efforts, after, as she feared, offending Providence--after facing Tailordom--the Countess was rolled away in a dingy fly unrewarded even by a penny, for what she had gone through.

For she possessed eminently the practical nature of her sex; and though she would have scorned, and would have declined to handle coin so base, its absence was upbraidingly mentioned in her spiritual outcries.

Not a penny! Nor was there, as in the miseries of retreat she affected indifferently to imagine, a Duke fished out of the ruins of her enterprise, to wash the mud off her garments and edge them with radiance.

Caroline, it became clear to her, had been infected by Evan's folly.