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The awful consequence of being Morgan’s daughter was at last plain to her. Taken together, the actions of father and daughter put the kind of marriage she had been promised and the future she envisaged for herself out of the question forever. She had behaved badly and he hardly any better. Socially they were doomed. Nor had Morgan’s political star shone as much as he would have liked since changing his name to Treherne. In 1857 he went up to Coventry to make his third assault on the constituency.

To the Freeman of Coventry ’twas Treherne who spoke—
Ere the Tories are beat there are crowns to be broke!
So here’s to the man who freedom would earn,
Let him follow the colours of Morgan Treherne.

Neither the candidacy nor the ballads had improved with age. Morgan came fourth out of five on the ballot and, when given the courtesy of a speech, held up his famous presentation watch, declaring bitterly: “It is a good watch; I value it highly, though it has cost me dear, for it has kept better time than its presenters of 1837 have kept faith with me.”

In April 1859 he tried again and was once again defeated. This time he was stung into reminding the electors of Ellice’s boast that Morgan would not serve Coventry for as long as he had breath. Ellice (who had not even come to Coventry to oversee his reelection, pleading gout as his excuse) at once denied he had ever said this and forced a humiliating public retraction. Victorian England was not so large that Morgan’s antics at Coventry and Georgina’s at Little Holland House could not be connected. Insofar as they were known at all outside Sussex, father and daughter had contrived to make too many enemies. The campaign to find the £10,000-a-year man lay in tatters.

Harry Weldon, meanwhile, was smoking cigars and playing billiards in barracks in his native Yorkshire. He had completely forgotten Georgina, and there had been no correspondence between them since January 1858. To his consternation, he was summoned back from the wilderness. The plump and enchanting girl he had bid for and lost now amazed him by writing to him. Unlike Ananias faced with the wrath of God, he was explicitly commanded not to give up the ghost. On the contrary, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, he found himself egged on to indiscretions he must often have pondered in the quiet of his quarters. He took leave to travel to Brighton.

The day is fixed, my beloved! On Thursday! I think, darling, the best way for us to meet is for you to be waiting for me in a fly at the bottom of the colonnade, your horse’s head turned towards the left and the vehicle itself not quite at the edge of the street: almost—but not quite—opposite Ayler the hat woman. I am sure to be there by half past ten. Keep the blinds of your carriage down and have patience, my Harry, not to look out. Then, darling, when I see you are there, I will open the carriage door, jump in, and you tell the coachman beforehand to drive out of town.

On this particular occasion, he had enough gallantry to obey her instructions up to a point. But there was prudence in Harry, or maybe it was callousness. That Thursday, which must have cost her dear in deception, ended in farce. At half past ten she burst out of the hat shop, saw the carriage, and ran toward it. She flung open the door. Inside, in the dark, his soldier servant greeted her with the gloomy words “Mr. Weldon is not here.”

Though setbacks like this did not deter her, if she was looking for gallantry in Harry she was soon disappointed. He wanted her physically with a passion that delighted her but was in most other ways the least gallant officer in the British Army. Just how much she told him about Merthyr and Lord Ward is unknown, but it would hardly have made a difference—Harry knew nothing about society and cared less. All he saw was that a plum had fallen into his lap. She was used to the indolence of titled young men; her brother Dal, newly commissioned in the West Kent Militia, was busy learning the same laconic, drawling manners. Harry’s lazy good humor came from a different and more homely source. Money burned a hole in his pocket, the army bored him, and he had no plans. She had all the plans. His letters to the prison that Mayfield had become were ordered to be wrapped in sheet music from Chappells. She even told him what scores to buy—Verdi. There were a handful of clandestine meetings.

Writing many years after, her nephew remarked, “No doubt existed that this was anything other than a love match.” He was quoting family history, for he himself had yet to be born. The evidence is all the other way. Harry was being driven along by forces out of his control. The only other explanation is that he was cynically abusing her. Of this time, when all her greater plans had been dashed to the ground, she writes of Morgan:

As we never dared open our lips in his presence, scarcely daring to breathe without his snubbing us unmercifully, and as he allowed us no amusement whatever, not even that of teaching the choir in the church at Mayfield, I left the paternal roof, where otherwise I should have been so happy, without much regret. I had no taste or need of marriage; in a convent I should have been the happiest of women, without a desire, without an aspiration: I was endowed with the most placid temperament in the world.

She was fooling herself. There is something quite manic in her pursuit of a little provincial Hussar she hardly knew. This is a woman in her twenties lighting matches in a gunpowder factory. At last, at the beginning of 1860, Harry came to her and explained that he had squandered his entire inheritance and all that was left for him to do was to go to India and there blow out his brains.

Instead, they married secretly at Aldershot on Saturday, April 21, 1860.