Our friend Pen said “How d’ye do, Mr. Bows,” in a loud cheery voice on perceiving that gentleman, and saluted him in a dashing off-hand manner, yet you could have seen a blush upon Arthur’s face (answered by Fanny, whose cheek straightway threw out a similar fluttering red signal); and after Bows and Arthur had shaken hands, and the former had ironically accepted the other’s assertion that he was about to pay Mr. Costigan’s chambers a visit, there was a gloomy and rather guilty silence in the company, which Pen presently tried to dispel by making a great rattling noise. The silence of course departed at Mr. Arthur’s noise, but the gloom remained and deepened, as the darkness does in a vault if you light up a single taper in it. Pendennis tried to describe, in a jocular manner, the transactions of the previous night, and attempted to give an imitation of Costigan vainly expostulating with the check-taker at Vauxhall. It was not a good imitation. What stranger can imitate that perfection? Nobody laughed. Mrs. Bolton did not in the least understand what part Mr. Pendennis was performing, and whether it was the check-taker or the Captain he was taking off. Fanny wore an alarmed face, and tried a timid giggle; old Mr. Bows looked as glum as when he fiddled in the orchestra, or played a difficult piece upon the old piano at the Back Kitchen. Pen felt that his story was a failure; his voice sank and dwindled away dismally at the end of it — flickered, and went out; and it was all dark again. You could hear the ticket-porter, who lolls about Shepherd’s Inn, as he passed on the flags under the archway: the clink of his boot-heels was noted by everybody.

“You were coming to see me, sir,” Mr. Bows said. “Won’t you have the kindness to walk up to my chambers with me? You do them a great honour, I am sure. They are rather high up; but ——”

“Oh! I live in a garret myself, and Shepherd’s Inn is twice as cheerful as Lamb Court,” Mr. Pendennis broke in.

“I knew that you had third-floor apartments,” Mr. Bows said; “and was going to say — you will please not take my remark as discourteous — that the air up three pair of stairs is wholesomer for gentlemen, than the air of a porter’s lodge.”

“Sir!” said Pen, whose candle flamed up again in his wrath, and who was disposed to be as quarrelsome as men are when they are in the wrong. “Will you permit me to choose my society without ——?

“You were so polite as to say that you were about to honour my umble domicile with a visit,” Mr. Bows said, with his sad voice. “Shall I show you the way? Mr. Pendennis and I are old friends, Mrs. Bolton — very old acquaintances; and at the earliest dawn of his life we crossed each other.”

The old man pointed towards the door with a trembling finger, and a hat in the other hand, and in an attitude slightly theatrical; so were his words when he spoke somewhat artificial, and chosen from the vocabulary which he had heard all his life from the painted lips of the orators before the stage-lamps. But he was not acting or masquerading, as Pen knew very well, though he was disposed to pooh-pooh the old fellow’s melodramatic airs. “Come along, sir,” he said, “as you are so very pressing. Mrs. Bolton, I wish you a good day. Good-bye, Miss Fanny; I shall always think of our night at Vauxhall with pleasure; and be sure I will remember the theatre tickets.” And he took her hand, pressed it, was pressed by it, and was gone.

“What a nice young man, to be sure!” cried Mrs. Bolton.

“D’you think so, ma?” said Fanny.

“I was a-thinkin who he was like. When I was at the Wells with Mrs. Serle,” Mrs. Bolton continued, looking through the window-curtain after Pen, as he went up the court with Bows, “there was a young gentleman from the city, that used to come in a tilbry, in a white at, the very image of him, only his whiskers was black, and Mr. P.‘s is red.”

“Law, ma! they are a most beautiful hawburn,” Fanny said.

“He used to come for Emly Budd, who danced Columbine in ‘Arleykin Ornpipe, or the Battle of Navarino,’ when Miss De la Bosky was took ill — a pretty dancer, and a fine stage figure of a woman — and he was a great sugar-baker in the city, with a country ouse at Omerton; and he used to drive her in the tilbry down Goswell Street Road; and one day they drove and was married at St. Bartholomew’s Church, Smithfield, where they ad their bands read quite private; and she now keeps her carriage, and I sor her name in the paper as patroness of the Manshing-House Ball for the Washywomen’s Asylum. And look at Lady Mirabel — capting Costigan’s daughter — she was profeshnl, as all very well know.” Thus, and more to this purpose, Mrs. Bolton spoke, now peeping through the window-curtain, now cleaning the mugs and plates, and consigning them to their place in the corner cupboard; and finishing her speech as she and Fanny shook out and folded up the dinner-cloth between them, and restored it to its drawer in the table.

Although Costigan had once before been made pretty accurately to understand what Pen’s pecuniary means and expectations were, I suppose Cos had forgotten the information acquired at Chatteris years ago, or had been induced by his natural enthusiasm to exaggerate his friend’s income. He had described Fairoaks Park in the most glowing terms to Mrs. Bolton, on the preceding evening, as he was walking about with her during Pen’s little escapade with Fanny, had dilated upon the enormous wealth of Pen’s famous uncle, the Major, and shown an intimate acquaintance with Arthur’s funded and landed property. Very likely Mrs. Bolton, in her wisdom, had speculated upon these matters during the night; and had had visions of Fanny driving in her carriage, like Mrs. Bolton’s old comrade, the dancer of Sadler’s Wells.

In the last operation of table-cloth folding, these two foolish women, of necessity, came close together; and as Fanny took the cloth and gave it the last fold, her mother put her finger under the young girl’s chin, and kissed her. Again the red signal flew out, and fluttered on Fanny’s cheek. What did it mean? It was not alarm this time. It was pleasure which caused the poor little Fanny to blush so. Poor little Fanny! What? is love sin? that it is so pleasant at the beginning, and so bitter at the end?

After the embrace, Mrs. Bolton thought proper to say that she was a-goin out upon business, and that Fanny must keep the lodge; which Fanny, after a very faint objection indeed, consented to do. So Mrs. Bolton took her bonnet and market-basket, and departed; and the instant she was gone, Fanny went and sae by the window which commanded Bows’s door, and never once took her eyes away from that quarter of Shepherd’s Inn.

Betsy-Jane and Ameliar-Ann were buzzing in one corner of the place, and making believe to read out of a picture-book, which one of them held topsy-turvy. It was a grave and dreadful tract, of Mr. Bolton’s collection. Fanny did not hear her sisters prattling over it. She noticed nothing but Bows’s door.

At last she gave a little shake, and her eyes lighted up. He had come out. He would pass the door again. But her poor little countenance fell in an instant more. Pendennis, indeed, came out; but Bows followed after him. They passed under the archway together. He only took off his hat, and bowed as he looked in. He did not stop to speak.

In three or four minutes — Fanny did not know how long, but she looked furiously at him when he c............