forgetting in his
ecstasy that he was not in the United States.

'But if I find when I get to Francisco anything to induce me to change
my mind, I shall change it. I like you very well, but I'm not going to
take a leap in the dark, and I'm not going to marry a pig in a poke.'

'There you're quite right,' he said,--'quite right.'

'You may give it out on board the ship that we're engaged, and I'll
tell Madame Melmotte the same. She and Croll don't mean going any
farther than New York.'

'We needn't break our hearts about that;--need we?'

'It don't much signify. Well;--I'll go on with Mrs Hurtle, if she'll
have me.'

'Too much delighted she'll be.'

'And she shall be told we're engaged.'

'My darling!'

'But if I don't like it when I get to Frisco, as you call it, all the
ropes in California shan't make me do it. Well--yes; you may give me a
kiss I suppose now if you care about it.' And so,--or rather so far,--
Mr Fisker and Marie Melmotte became engaged to each other as man and
wife.

After that Mr Fisker's remaining business in England went very
smoothly with him. It was understood up at Hampstead that he was
engaged to Marie Melmotte,--and it soon came to be understood also that
Madame Melmotte was to be married to Herr Croll. No doubt the father
of the one lady and the husband of the other had died so recently as
to make these arrangements subject to certain censorious objections.
But there was a feeling that Melmotte had been so unlike other men,
both in his life and in his death, that they who had been concerned
with him were not to be weighed by ordinary scales. Nor did it much
matter, for the persons concerned took their departure soon after the
arrangement was made, and Hampstead knew them no more.

On the 3rd of September Madame Melmotte, Marie, Mrs Hurtle, Hamilton
K. Fisker, and Herr Croll left Liverpool for New York; and the three
ladies were determined that they never would revisit a country of
which their reminiscences certainly were not happy. The writer of the
present chronicle may so far look forward,--carrying his reader with
him,--as to declare that Marie Melmotte did become Mrs Fisker very
soon after her arrival at San Francisco.

CHAPTER XCIX - LADY CARBURY AND MR BROUNE

When Sir Felix Carbury declared to his friends at the Beargarden that
he intended to devote the next few months of his life to foreign
travel, and that it was his purpose to take with him a Protestant
div