, "Come what may, he will be
the ruin of her"--all these performed their parts with their accustomed
talent; and it was with a sincere regret that all our friends saw the
curtain drop down and end that pretty and tender story.

If Pen had been alone with his mother in the carriage as they went home,
he would have told her all, that night; but he sate on the box in the
moonshine smoking a cigar by the side of Smirke, who warmed himself
with a comforter. Mr. Foker's tandem and lamps whirled by the sober old
Clavering posters as they were a couple of miles on their road home,
and Mr. Spavin saluted Mrs. Pendennis's carriage with some considerable
variations of Rule Britannia on the key-bugle.

It happened two days after the above gaieties that Mr. Dean of Chatteris
entertained a few select clerical friends at dinner at his Deanery Home.
That they drank uncommonly good port wine, and abused the Bishop over
their dessert, are very likely matters: but with such we have nothing at
present to do. Our friend Doctor Portman, of Clavering, was one of the
Dean's guests, and being a gallant man, and seeing from his place at
the mahogany the Dean's lady walking up and down the grass, with her
children sporting around her, and her pink parasol over her lovely
head--the Doctor stept out of the French windows of the dining-room
into the lawn, which skirts that apartment, and left the other white
neckcloths to gird at my lord Bishop. Then the Doctor went up and
offered Mrs. Dean his arm, and they sauntered over the ancient velvet
lawn, which had been mowed and rolled for immemorial Deans, in that
easy, quiet, comfortable manner, in which people of middle age and good
temper walk after a good dinner, in a calm golden summer evening, when
the sun has but just sunk behind the enormous cathedral-towers, and the
sickle-shaped moon is growing every instant brighter in the heavens.

Now at the end of the Dean's garden there is, as we have stated, Mrs.
Creed's house, and the windows of the first-floor room were open to
admit the pleasant summer air. A young lady of six-and-twenty, whose
eyes were perfectly wide open, and a luckless boy of eighteen, blind
with love and infatuation, were in that chamber together; in which
persons, as we have before seen them in the same place, the reader
will have no difficulty in recognising Mr. Arthur Pendennis and Miss
Costigan.

The poor boy had taken the plunge. Trembling with passionate emotion,
his hear