Georgina saw out the year 1857 at Gate House feeling ‘unwell, cold and wretched’, surrounded by her unsympathetic family and wondering how she would get through the rest of the winter. The bleakness of her mood was enhanced when Florence and Emily, home from school for the Christmas holidays, told her a terrible secret. They had discovered, from reading the diary of a fellow pupil, that their ‘aristocratic, noble mother’ was illegitimate – a fact which had been concealed from them up to this time. Emily and Florence thought that this was ‘rather fun’, but Georgina was horrified. She rushed to her mother ‘with red and flaming eyes’, sobbing ‘It can't be true! It can't be true!’ When Louisa ‘flushed scarlet all over her face’, and admitted that it was indeed true, Georgina felt ‘turned to stone’.

She was particularly worried about the effect that this revelation might have on her marriage prospects:

Relief was, however, at hand. Early in the New Year Louisa received a letter from Tizey Smith, an old school-friend, informing her that she had just met a junior officer in the 6th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Dragoons, who was ‘The most charming, most adorable boy who could be imagined’. He was ‘handsome, tall and rich’; he already had an income of £10,000 a year, and he was heir to his mother and grandmother. Louisa was urged to make sure that this paragon met Georgina as soon as possible. And, in Georgina's own words, Louisa and her three daughters ‘went running’. The officer was William Henry (Harry) Weldon, and he and Georgina met for the first time at a party in Brighton at the end of January. Harry was twenty, a few weeks older than Georgina, and he had joined the dragoons as a cornet eight months earlier.