port.

Aunt Rebecca met him with her hood on in the hall. She asked him, with a
faltering sort of carelessness, looking very hard at the clock, and
nearly with her back to him--

'Lieutenant, will you take a turn in the garden with me?'

To which Puddock, with almost a start--for he had not seen her till she
spoke--and, upon my word, 'tis a fact, with a blush, too--made a sudden
smile, and a bow, and a suitable reply in low tones; and forth they
sallied together, and into the garden, and up and down the same walk,
for a good while--a long while--people sometimes don't count the
minutes--with none but Peter Brian, the gardener, whom they did not see,
to observe them.

When they came to the white wicket-door of the garden, Aunt Rebecca
hastily dropped his arm, on which she had leaned; and together they
returned to the house very affably; and there Aunt Becky bid him
good-bye in a whisper, a little hastily; and Puddock, so soon as he
found Dominick, asked for the general.

He had gone down to the river; and Puddock followed. As he walked along
the court, he looked up; there was a kind of face at the window. He
smiled a great deal and raised his hat, and placed it to his heart, and
felt quite bewildered, like a man in a dream; and in this state he
marched down to the river's bank.

They had not been together for a full minute when the stout general
threw back his head, looking straight in his face; and then he stepped
first one, then another, fat little pace backward, and poked his cane
right at the ribs of the plump little lieutenant, then closing with him,
he shook both Puddock's hands in both his, with a hearty peal of
laughter.

Then he took Puddock under his arm. Puddock had to stoop to pick up his
hat which the general had dislodged. And so the general walks him slowly
towards the house; sometimes jogging his elbow a little under his ribs;
sometimes calling a halt and taking his collar in his finger and thumb,
thrusting him out a little, and eyeing him over with a sort of swagger,
and laughing and coughing, and whooping, and laughing again, almost to
strangulation; and altogether extraordinarily boisterous, and hilarious,
and familiar, as Cluffe thought, who viewed this spectacle from the
avenue.

Mr. Sterling would not have been quite so amused at a similar freak of
Mrs. Hidleberg's--but our honest general was no especial worshipper of
money--he was rich, too, and his daughter, well dowered, was about to
m