ter whatever, nor any pointed
liveliness of mind to match and wrestle with his own, and cheer the
domestic hearth! But she was certainly beautiful. Edward kissed her hand
in commendation. Though it was practically annoying that she should
be sad, the hue and spirit of sadness came home to her aspect. Sorrow
visited her tenderly falling eyelids like a sister.

CHAPTER XII

Edward's engagement at his Club had been with his unfortunate cousin
Algernon; who not only wanted a dinner but 'five pounds or so' (the
hazy margin which may extend illimitably, or miserably contract, at the
lender's pleasure, and the necessity for which shows the borrower to be
dancing on Fortune's tight-rope above the old abyss).

"Over claret," was to have been the time for the asking; and Algernon
waited dinnerless until the healthy-going minutes distended and swelled
monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the venerable
Signior, Time, became of unhealthy hue. For this was the first dinner
which, during the whole course of the young man's career, had ever been
failing to him. Reflect upon the mournful gap! He could scarcely believe
in his ill-luck. He suggested it to himself with an inane grin, as one
of the far-away freaks of circumstances that had struck him--and was it
not comical?

He waited from the hour of six till the hour of seven. He compared
clocks in the hall and the room. He changed the posture of his legs
fifty times. For a while he wrestled right gallantly with the apparent
menace of the Fates that he was to get no dinner at all that day; it
seemed incredibly derisive, for, as I must repeat, it had never happened
to him by any accident before. "You are born--you dine." Such appeared
to him to be the positive regulation of affairs, and a most proper
one,--of the matters of course following the birth of a young being.

By what frightful mischance, then, does he miss his dinner? By placing
the smallest confidence in the gentlemanly feeling of another man!
Algernon deduced this reply accurately from his own experience, and
whether it can be said by other "undined" mortals, does not matter in
the least. But we have nothing to do with the constitutionally luckless:
the calamitous history of a simple empty stomach is enough. Here the
tragedy is palpable. Indeed, too sadly so, and I dare apply but a flash
of the microscope to the rageing dilemmas of this animalcule. Five and
twenty minutes had signalled their departure