tor?"--

"If he be not the man, and my story be not true, I give you leave to
call me rogue. Just now I was in the little lumber room off the
Meister's, where he keeps his samples of colors, and I was looking out
some that we shall want to-morrow--for he blew me up about them
yesterday--when I heard Mamsell Helene come into his room, and they had
a long confabulation. I could not hear it all, but the upshot of it
was, that she means to take him. Of course she made a fuss about
it--but when he said: 'He is to dine with us to-day, and you can give
him your answer,' she was mum as a mouse. If she did not mean it to be
favorable, I much mistake her if she would not have declined the
pleasure of eating her dinner with him first. She is not so fond of
speaking up, and saying no to a fellow, as I know by my own
experience."

"Surely you must have heard wrong, Peter;" and the young fellow fell
into a fit of musing; "it can't be possible."

"Can't be possible!--but what's the use of talking of men's business to
a baby. I only repeated the thing that I might not choke upon it. For a
girl like that, to go and marry a rusty fusty lawyer--a scribbler of
deeds and parchments! He has not a conception of what she is worth,
except in thalers! Ha!--would not she be a delicate morsel for an
artist, who looks farther than a trifle of white and red and those
mincing ways that attract the crowd. What does a lawyer know about the
lines of her face?--and that she has a figure fit to drive a fellow
crazy? She does not show it off, to be sure--she wraps to the chin, as
if she were a mummy,--more's the pity!--a stone might weep to see her!
But for a man who has eyes in his head, one little finger is enough to
construe the whole figure by, and you might search the world over,
before you could find--"

"Silence!" interrupted Walter passionately--"I will not hear another
word." He had sprung to his feet, with a flaming face. "Get out! I say,
and never let me hear that you have spoken your foul thoughts to any
other living soul--or else--"

And he struck his clenched fist upon the table, with a violence that
made the very walls shake.

"Milksop! baby face!" and Peter gnashed his teeth, while he retreated
from his immediate neighbourhood; "It shall go to its mother--it
shall--and have its pap--and sit on its own mammy's lap, and have a
smart new dress for her wedding-day. Ha! such a fellow as that is not
worthy of a man's confidence. I did fee