.

IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN.
Right soon the London pot began to bubble.

There was a marriage.
'There are marriages by the thousand every day of the year that is not consecrated to prayer for the forgiveness of our sins,' the Old Buccaneer, writing it with simple intent, says, by way of preface to a series of Maxims for men who contemplate acceptance of the yoke.
This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences, black as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations, disastrous eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise, Phaethon's descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world.

Asserted here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a serpent of vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible.

Contradiction retired into corners, only to be swept out of them.