"For I am not the first who found
The name of Mary fatal!"

says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper's.

Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He
had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one, and
to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and sister
whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In fact, he
had been prodigal of the excellences of his nature, which it is not good
to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an
admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at
the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was
left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a
little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as
poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every
way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression,
for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his
good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as
his equal. She had blackened the world's fair aspect for him.

In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved his
wonted demeanor, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs. Doria
Forey, his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired from his
Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and that kind of
thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in public and private,