ack-eyed woman could, accompanied her husband downstairs. In the
pleasant little parlour opening on the garden, sat a gentleman, who rose
to advance towards her when she came in, but turned off, by reason of
some peculiarity in his legs, and was only stopped by the table.

Florence then remembered Cousin Feenix, whom she had not at first
recognised in the shade of the leaves. Cousin Feenix took her hand, and
congratulated her upon her marriage.

'I could have wished, I am sure,' said Cousin Feenix, sitting down
as Florence sat, to have had an earlier opportunity of offering my
congratulations; but, in point of fact, so many painful occurrences have
happened, treading, as a man may say, on one another's heels, that I
have been in a devil of a state myself, and perfectly unfit for every
description of society. The only description of society I have kept, has
been my own; and it certainly is anything but flattering to a man's good
opinion of his own sources, to know that, in point of fact, he has the
capacity of boring himself to a perfectly unlimited extent.'

Florence divined, from some indefinable constraint and anxiety in this
gentleman's manner--which was always a gentleman's, in spite of the
harmless little eccentricities that attached to it--and from Walter's
manner no less, that something more immediately tending to some object
was to follow this.

'I have been mentioning to my friend Mr Gay, if I may be allowed to have
the honour of calling him so,' said Cousin Feenix, 'that I am rejoiced
to hear that my friend Dombey is very decidedly mending. I trust my
friend Dombey will not allow his mind to be too much preyed upon, by any
mere loss of fortune. I cannot say that I have ever experienced any very
great loss of fortune myself: never having had, in point of fact, any
great amount of fortune to lose. But as much as I could lose, I have
lost; and I don't find that I particularly care about it. I know my
friend Dombey to be a devilish honourable man; and it's calculated to
console my friend Dombey very much, to know, that this is the universal
sentiment. Even Tommy Screwzer,--a man of an extremely bilious habit,
with whom my friend Gay is probably acquainted--cannot say a syllable in
disputation of the fact.'

Florence felt, more than ever, that there was something to come; and
looked earnestly for it. So earnestly, that Cousin Feenix answered, as
if she had spoken.

'The fact is,' said Cousin Feenix, 'that my