Henrietta's case was a secondary affair. What with her passion--it was
nothing less--and her lover's cunning arts, and her father's consent
given, and in truth the look of the two together, the dissuasion of them
from union was as likely to keep them apart as an exhortation addressed
to magnet and needle. Countess Livia attacked Carinthia Jane and the
admiral backing her. But the admiral, having given his consent to his
daughter's marriage, in consequence of the earl's pledged word to 'his
other girl,' had become a zealot for this marriage and there was only not
a grand altercation on the subject because Livia shunned annoyances.
Alone with Carinthia Jane, as she reported to Henrietta, she spoke to a
block, that shook a head and wore a thin smile and nursed its own idea of
the better knowledge of Edward Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, gained in the
run of a silly quadrille at a ball:

What is a young man's word to his partner in a quadrille?

Livia put the question, she put it twice rather sternly, and the girl
came out with: 'Oh, he meant it!'

The nature, the pride, the shifty and furious moods of Lord Fleetwood
were painted frightful to her.

She had conceived her own image of him.

Whether to set her down as an enamoured idiot or a creature not a whit
less artful than her brother, was Countess Livia's debate. Her
inclination was to misdoubt the daughter of the Old Buccaneer: she might
be simple, at her age, and she certainly was ignorant; but she clung to
her prize. Still the promise was extracted from her, that she would not
worry the earl to fulfil the word she supposed him to mean in its full