gs, and
got her gloves on, finger by finger, and finally got them on her
little plump hands, and bade him good-bye and went down. Mr Lightwood's
impatience was much relieved when he found her dressed for departure.

'Mr Rokesmith goes with us?' he said, hesitating, with a look towards
the door.

'Oh, I forgot!' replied Bella. 'His best compliments. His face is
swollen to the size of two faces, and he is to go to bed directly, poor
fellow, to wait for the doctor, who is coming to lance him.'

'It is curious,' observed Lightwood, 'that I have never yet seen Mr
Rokesmith, though we have been engaged in the same affairs.'

'Really?' said the unblushing Bella.

'I begin to think,' observed Lightwood, 'that I never shall see him.'

'These things happen so oddly sometimes,' said Bella with a steady
countenance, 'that there seems a kind of fatality in them. But I am
quite ready, Mr Lightwood.'

They started directly, in a little carriage that Lightwood had brought
with him from never-to-be-forgotten Greenwich; and from Greenwich they
started directly for London; and in London they waited at a railway
station until such time as the Reverend Frank Milvey, and Margaretta
his wife, with whom Mortimer Lightwood had been already in conference,
should come and join them.

That worthy couple were delayed by a portentous old parishioner of the
female gender, who was one of the plagues of their lives, and with whom
they bore with most exemplary sweetness and good-humour, notwithstanding
her having an infection of absurdity about her, that communicated itself
to everything with which, and everybody with whom, she came in contact.
She was a member of the Reverend Frank's congregation, and made a point
of distinguishing herself in that body, by conspicuously weeping at
everything, however cheering, said by the Reverend Frank in his public
ministration; also by applying to herself the various lamentations of
David, and complaining in a personally injured manner (much in arrear of
the clerk and the rest of the respondents) that her enemies were digging
pit-falls about her, and breaking her with rods of iron. Indeed, this
old widow discharged herself of that portion of the Morning and Evening
Service as if she were lodging a complaint on oath and applying for
a warrant before a magistrate. But this was not her most inconvenient
characteristic, for that took the form of an impression, usually
recurring in inclement weather and at about