hand towards her
dear girl's, 'what does Georgy say?'

'She says,' replied Mr Lammle, interpreting for her, 'that in her eyes
you look well in any colour, Sophronia, and that if she had expected to
be embarrassed by so pretty a compliment as she has received, she would
have worn another colour herself. Though I tell her, in reply, that it
would not have saved her, for whatever colour she had worn would have
been Fledgeby's colour. But what does Fledgeby say?'

'He says,' replied Mrs Lammle, interpreting for him, and patting the
back of her dear girl's hand, as if it were Fledgeby who was patting it,
'that it was no compliment, but a little natural act of homage that
he couldn't resist. And,' expressing more feeling as if it were more
feeling on the part of Fledgeby, 'he is right, he is right!'

Still, no not even now, would they look at one another. Seeming to gnash
his sparkling teeth, studs, eyes, and buttons, all at once, Mr Lammle
secretly bent a dark frown on the two, expressive of an intense desire
to bring them together by knocking their heads together.

'Have you heard this opera of to-night, Fledgeby?' he asked, stopping
very short, to prevent himself from running on into 'confound you.'

'Why no, not exactly,' said Fledgeby. 'In fact I don't know a note of
it.'

'Neither do you know it, Georgy?' said Mrs Lammle. 'N-no,' replied
Georgiana, faintly, under the sympathetic coincidence.

'Why, then,' said Mrs Lammle, charmed by the discovery which flowed from
the premises, 'you neither of you know it! How charming!'

Even the craven Fledgeby felt that the time was now come when he must
strike a blow. He struck it by saying, partly to Mrs Lammle and partly
to the circumambient air, 'I consider myself very fortunate in being
reserved by--'

As he stopped dead, Mr Lammle, making that gingerous bush of his
whiskers to look out of, offered him the word 'Destiny.'

'No, I wasn't going to say that,' said Fledgeby. 'I was going to say
Fate. I consider it very fortunate that Fate has written in the book
of--in the book which is its own property--that I should go to that
opera for the first time under the memorable circumstances of going with
Miss Podsnap.'

To which Georgiana replied, hooking her two little fingers in one
another, and addressing the tablecloth, 'Thank you, but I generally go
with no one but you, Sophronia, and I like that very much.'

Content perforce with this success for the time, Mr Lammle