Such are the petty accidents affecting circumstances.

They are the instruments of Destiny.
There he lay, protesting that the ceremony could not possibly be for the fourteenth, because Countess Livia had, he now remembered, written of her engagement to meet Russett on the night of that day at a ball at Mrs.Cowper Quillett's place, Canleys, lying south of the Surrey hills: a house famed for its gatherings of beautiful women; whither Lord Fleetwood would be sure to engage to go, the admiral now said; and it racked him like gout in his mind, and perhaps troubled his conscience about handing the girl to such a young man.

But he was lying on his back, the posture for memory to play the fiend with us, as we read in the BOOK of MAXIMS of the Old Buccaneer.

Admiral Baldwin wished heartily to be present at his Crinny's wedding 'to see her launched,' if wedding it was to be, and he vowed the date of the fourteenth, in Lord Levellier's announcement of it, must be an error and might be a month in advance, and ought to be.

But it was sheer talking and raving for a solace to his disappointment or his anxiety.