‘Pretty much so,’ replied Wentworth.
‘Then,’ replied the lawyer, with a triumphant air, ‘we have little to fear. Sergeant B.’—naming a popular advocate of the day—‘would laugh the case out of court in a quarter of an hour. You have a quarrel with the deceased. Your good lady has—to put it not too strongly—been insulted and shamefully ill-treated by him. Who would believe that, in promoting this suit—should you be so ill-advised as to do that—you came into court with clean hands? The idea is perfectly preposterous.’
The worst of it was that Wentworth, as he withdrew, was compelled to own that there was not a little truth in what the lawyer had said.
It was not law but equity that was required in his particular case. In England law and equity, alas! have often different meanings.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE ITALIAN COUNTESS.
‘How lovely!’ said a lady to a gentleman on the deck by her side, as they were drinking in all the beauty of the scene as one of the fine ships of the Orient Company dropped her anchor in the Bay of Naples. ‘And look what a swarm of boats have come out to greet us!’
They were a swarm indeed, some of them with divers to exhibit their prowess, some with fruit and flowers, some with the lava ornaments in the manufacture of which the Neapolitans exhibit such exquisite skill, and others with musicians—vocal and instrumental—keeping up for the time quite a serenade. These Neapolitans gain but little, it is to be feared, on such occasions, but the Neapolitans are a frugal people, and make a little go a long way.
The lady was Rose, the gentleman by her side was her husband.
‘Yes; and see, one of the boats has a young girl who has come on deck with flowers, which she is fastening in the gentlemen’s coats in hope of a small fee. How pretty she looks!’
The girl approached Rose, to whom she offered a flower.