His darling sin

by M. E. Braddon

There was the usual rush with glasses of water and smelling-salts, and the witness was carried out of court.

The Court then adjourned for luncheon. The picture-hats all waited, sniffed salts and eau de Cologne, nibbled chocolates, hungry, and yawning for want of air, but determined to see it out.

There was bitter disappointment for the curious impertinents when, on the judge returning to his seat, Sir Joseph Jalland informed his lordship that Mr. Brown Smith had offered an ample apology for the offensive article in his paper, and that his client had no desire to continue the action in a vindictive manner.

The judge highly approved of this course.

"If Lady Perivale brought this action in order to clear her character of a most unmerited aspersion, she has been completely successful, and can afford to be lenient," said his lordship, with feeling.

The defendant was to publish his apology, both in his own paper and such other papers as Sir Joseph should name. He was to destroy every number of his paper still unsold, and to call in any numbers remaining in the hands of the retail trade, and was further to give one hundred guineas to any charitable institution selected by the plaintiff.

Only to Lady Perivale's solicitors and to Mr. Faunce was it known that the defendant would not be out of pocket either by this hundred guineas, or for the costs of the action, against which a considerable sum had been paid into his banking account by Mr. Faunce, before the libel—written by that very Faunce, in collaboration with one of the ladies who did the Bon Ton gossip—appeared in Mr. Brown Smith's popular journal.

Faunce had said there would be a libel when it was wanted, and Faunce, who was an old friend of Brown Smith's, had produced the libel. Nobody was any the worse, and Society was deeply humiliated at discovering how cruelly it had misjudged a charming member of its own privileged body. Lady Morningside and her husband made their way to Lady Perivale directly the judge left his seat, and the old Marquis, with an old-fashioned gallantry that recalled "Cupid" Palmerston, bent over Grace's ungloved hand and kissed it: a demonstration that thrilled the smart hats and eye-glasses.

Cards and letters of friendly congratulation poured in upon Lady Perivale at Grosvenor Square that evening—letters from the people who had cut her, making believe that the aloofness had been all on her side.

"And now, dear, after this plucky assertion of yourself, I hope you are not going to shut yourself from your old friends any more. It has been so sad to see No. 101 empty all the season, and not even to know where you were to be found," concluded one of those false friends.