With this circle, a few excepted, no renewal of intimacy took place, either on the part of Lord Albert or Lord Glenmore. They found, by public report, that the fate of some who had figured in it had been such as their course must sooner or later have brought them to. Mr. Leslie Winyard had married, a few months after Lady Glenmore's departure, an heiress of immense wealth; who, dazzled with the idea of obtaining the _entrée_ into that circle of _ton_ in which he moved, and betrayed by the delusive hope of reclaiming him from its more destructive follies by her love and devotion, had given him her hand, her fortune, and her happiness. Enormous, however, as was her wealth, it was soon dissipated in the payment of his previous debts, and the endless extravagances into which he plunged: and in eighteen months after their union she had died of a broken heart; having lived to witness the foul desertion of the man for whom she had sacrificed every thing, and who was then living, in open violation of all religious and moral feeling, with a recent victim of his seduction.
Lady Glenmore shuddered as she heard these details, and lifted up her hands in silent thanksgiving to the Almighty for having been preserved from so awful a fate. As regarded Lord Albert, if any thing could have been requisite to confirm him in the proper estimate he had formed of Lady Hamlet Vernon's character, and the danger he had escaped, he would have found it in _her_ subsequent history; for, pursuing the same course of intrigue in which she had so nearly involved him, she at length fell into the toils spread for others, and became the dupe of her own vicious folly. Brought to a situation in which the fruits of her conduct would soon become glaringly apparent, and which, if discovered, must have driven her from that circle where every thing depended on avoiding _detection_, and scorned by the man she had sought to inveigle, she was obliged, as a last resource, to veil her infamy by a marriage with Mr. Foley, with whom she lived at present on those terms of mutual unhappiness which would naturally be the consequence of such a union.
Some few there were of the _coterie_, who had been timely warned, and, seeing the tendency of the course they were pursuing, had withdrawn from the magic sphere to better and more stable pursuits. Among these was Lord Gascoigne, whose quick intelligence and clear head, accompanied by a goodness of heart which he often concealed under a show of levity, had preserved him from losing himself entirely in the vortex of folly. Lord and Lady Baskerville, too, had seen their error--an error more of the head arising from the contamination of example, than of the heart; and who now lived as became their station, and in the way which bade a fair promise for virtuous happiness; while others of the number continued their heartless round, without coming to any open disgrace, and yet without making any reform. Among these, again, was Lady Tilney, who continued still the _soi-disant_ queen of _ton_, blind to the approach of that period when her empire must yield, in despite of all her strenuous efforts to uphold it, to that of some fresh rising beauty; and still insensible to the dreadful vacuum which in the decline of life, without the sincerity of friendship and the resources of a well-cultivated mind--above all, without religious trust to cheer and gild the setting sun of life--must be the miserable portion of every human creature.