entreaties to him to have mercy.

"Why should I spare him?" Osborne said to his friend's remonstrances,
when they quitted the invalid, leaving him under the hands of Doctor
Gollop. "What the deuce right has he to give himself his patronizing
airs, and make fools of us at Vauxhall? Who's this little schoolgirl
that is ogling and making love to him? Hang it, the family's low enough
already, without HER. A governess is all very well, but I'd rather
have a lady for my sister-in-law. I'm a liberal man; but I've proper
pride, and know my own station: let her know hers. And I'll take down
that great hectoring Nabob, and prevent him from being made a greater
fool than he is. That's why I told him to look out, lest she brought
an action against him."

"I suppose you know best," Dobbin said, though rather dubiously. "You
always were a Tory, and your family's one of the oldest in England.
But--"

"Come and see the girls, and make love to Miss Sharp yourself," the
lieutenant here interrupted his friend; but Captain Dobbin declined to
join Osborne in his daily visit to the young ladies in Russell Square.

As George walked down Southampton Row, from Holborn, he laughed as he
saw, at the Sedley Mansion, in two different stories two heads on the
look-out.

The fact is, Miss Amelia, in the drawing-room balcony, was looking very
eagerly towards the opposite side of the Square, where Mr. Osborne
dwelt, on the watch for the lieutenant himself; and Miss Sharp, from
her little bed-room on the second floor, was in observation until Mr.
Joseph's great form should heave in sight.

"Sister Anne is on the watch-tower," said he to Amelia, "but there's
nobody coming"; and laughing and enjoying the joke hugely, he described
in the most ludicrous terms to Miss Sedley, the dismal condition of her
brother.

"I think it's very cruel of you to laugh, George," she said, looking
particularly unhappy; but George only laughed the more at her piteous
and discomfited mien, persisted in thinking the joke a most diverting
one, and when Miss Sharp came downstairs, bantered her with a great
deal of liveliness upon the effect of her charms on the fat civilian.

"O Miss Sharp! if you could but see him this morning," he
said--"moaning in his flowered dressing-gown--writhing on his sofa; if
you could but have seen him lolling out his tongue to Gollop the
apothecary."

"See whom?" said Miss Sharp.

"Whom? O whom? Captain Dobbin, of course, to whom we