val every day?
If she undervalues me,
What care I how fair she be?"

CHAPTER XVII.

THE WIDOW OF A MINISTER OF FINANCE.

"You are just in time, Arbuthnot, to do me a service," said Dalrymple,
looking up from his desk as I went in, and reaching out his hand to me
over a barricade of books and papers.

"Then I am very glad I have come," I replied. "But what confusion is
this? Are you going anywhere?"

"Yes--to perdition. There, kick that rubbish out of your way and sit
down."

Never very orderly, Dalrymple's rooms were this time in as terrible a
litter as can well be conceived. The table was piled high with bills,
old letters, books, cigars, gloves, card-cases, and pamphlets. The
carpet was strewn with portmanteaus, hat-cases, travelling-straps, old
luggage labels, railway wrappers, and the like. The chairs and sofas
were laden with wearing apparel. As for Dalrymple himself, he looked
haggard and weary, as though the last four weeks had laid four years
upon his shoulders.

"You look ill," I said clearing a corner of the sofa for my own
accommodation; "or _ennuye_, which is much the same thing. What is the
matter? And what can I do for you?"

"The matter is that I am going abroad," said he, with his chin resting
moodily in his two palms and his elbows on the table.

"Going abroad! Where?"

"I don't know--

'Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world.'

It's of very little consequence whether I betake myself to the East or
to the West; eat rice in the tropics, or drink train-oil at the Pole."

"But have you no settled projects?"

"None whatever."

"And don't care what becomes of you?"

"Not in the least."

"Then, in Heaven's name, what has happened?"

"The very thing that, three weeks ago, would have made me the happiest
fellow in Christendom. What are you going to do to-morrow?"

"Nothing, beyond my ordinary routine of medical study."

"Humph! Could you get a whole holiday, for once?"

I remembered how many I had taken of late, and felt ashamed of the
readiness with which I replied:--

"Oh yes! easily."

"Well, then, I want you to spend the day with me. It will be, perhaps,
my last in Paris for many a month, or even many a year. I ... Pshaw! I
may as well say it, and have done with it. I am going to be married."

"Married!" I exclaimed, in blank amazement; for it was the last thing I
should have guessed.

Dalrymple tugged away at his moustache with both hands, as was his habi