t your indisposition which
has prevented you from coming to see me. I have been expecting you every
day since Soames wrote his last letter. But it's no use pretending any
longer. Oh, Peter, Peter!" This use of his Christian name struck him
absolutely dumb, so that he was unable to utter a syllable. He should,
first of all, have told her that any excuse she had before for calling
him by his Christian name was now at an end. But there was no opening
for speech such as that. "Well," she continued, "have you got nothing to
say to me? You can write flippant letters to other people, and turn me
into ridicule glibly enough."

"I have never done so."

"Did you not write to Joe Thoroughbung, and tell him you had given up
all thoughts of having me?"

"Joe!" he exclaimed. His very surprise did not permit him to go farther,
at the moment, than this utterance of the young man's Christian name.

"Yes, Joe,--Joe Thoroughbung, my nephew, and yours that is to be. Did you
not write and tell him that everything was over?"

"I never wrote to young Mr. Thoroughbung in my life. I should not have
dreamed of such a correspondence on such a subject."

"Well, he says you did. Or, if you didn't write to Joe himself, you
wrote to somebody."

"I may have written to somebody, certainly."

"And told them that you didn't mean to have anything farther to say to
me?" That traitor Harry had now committed a sin worse that knocking a
man down in the middle of the night and leaving him bleeding,
speechless, and motionless; worse than telling a lie about it;--worse
even than declining to listen to sermons read by his uncle. Harry had
committed such a sin that no shilling of allowance should evermore be
paid to him. Even at this moment there went through Mr. Prosper's brain
an idea that there might be some unmarried female in England besides
Miss Puffle and Miss Thoroughbung. "Peter Prosper, why don't you answer
like a man, and tell me the honest truth?" He had never before been
called Peter Prosper in his whole life.

"Perhaps you had better let me make a communication by letter," he said.
At that very moment the all but completed epistle was lying on the table
before him, where even her eyes might reach it. In the flurry of the
moment he covered it up.

"Perhaps that is the letter which has taken you so long to write?" she
said.

"It is the letter."

"Then hand it me over, and save yourself the penny stamp." In his
confusion he gave her the