But, alas for Harriette!
jealousy for once got the better of her love of gain; her pride was
wounded to see a sister flirting with her affianced lord, and in a
moment of irritation, she in a most unequivocal manner publicly asserted
her right to his person: the gallant yielded, the bond was __null and
void, the _promise burnt_, his grace relieved from the payment of eight
hundred pounds per annum, and his son the Marquis, profiting by past
experience, not so green as to renew the former obligation.
"My intention is not to pirate the lady's memoirs, and so rob her of
the fair gain of her professional ~50~~experience," said Crony, when I
mentioned these circumstances to him afterwards; "I only mean to supply
certain trifling omissions in the biography of Harriette and her family,
which the fair narrator has very modestly suppressed. It is but a few
months since, that passing accidentally into Warwick-court, Holborn,
to call upon an old friend, a navy lieutenant on half-pay, I thought I
recognised the well-known superlative wig of the dandy Rochforte, thrust
longitudinally forward from beneath the sash of a two pair of stairs
window.--Can it be possible? thought I: and then again, I asked myself,
why not? for the last time I saw him he was rusticating in Surrey,
beating the balls about in _Banco Regis_; from which black place he did
not escape without a little white-washing: however, he's a full Colonel
of some unknown corps of South American Independents for all that, and
was once in his life, although for a very short time, a full Cornet, in
Lincoln Stanhope's regiment, the 17th dragoons, I think it was, and has
never clipped his mustachios since, one would imagine, by their length
and ferocious appearance.
Pages:
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553