Page:Romance & Reality 3.pdf/329

Rh and the mirror that could no longer reflect, a beauty.

Mr. Delawarr's life was spent in debates and dinners. Once, for a few weeks, he was in the opposition—caught cold, and decided that such a position was equally bad for his own and his country's constitution—resumed, and never after resigned his post under government. He died the first and last Earl of Delawarr. Mrs. Francis Boyne Sillery played cards to an interminable old age; and her youthful husband died, five years after their marriage, of the jaundice. There were some on dits afloat respecting a third marriage with a "certain young writer," whose hymns had converted every old lady in Bath; but it never took place. The respectable family of the Higgs's got on amazingly well in the world: the sons, as their mother was wont exultingly to state, were quite gentlemen, and spent a power of money on their clothes. The Countess, as in their own circle she was invariably called, used always to choose for her favourite topics the uncertainty of worldly distinctions—the horrors of a revolution—and the melancholy situation of a nobleman in a foreign land, where he was forced