in a state of uncomplaining bondage. Not that I believe she
ever cared about him. Tom was as poor as a church-mouse, and had nothing
on earth to look to except the fruits of his professional industry,
which, judging from all appearances, would be a long time indeed in
ripening. Mary was not the sort of person to put up with love in a
cottage, even had Tom's circumstances been adequate to defray the rent
of a tenement of that description: she had a vivid appreciation not only
of the substantials, but of the higher luxuries of existence. But her
vanity was flattered at having in her train at least one devoted
dangler, whom she could play off, whenever opportunity required, against
some more valuable admirer. Besides, Strachan was a man of family, tall,
good-looking, and unquestionably clever in his way: he also danced the
polka well, and was useful in the ball-room or the pic-nic. So Mary
Rivers kept him on in a kind of blissful dream, just sunning him
sufficiently with her smiles to make him believe that he was beloved,
but never allowing matters to go so far as to lead to the report that
they were engaged. Tom asked for nothing more. He was quite contented to
indulge for years in a dream of future bliss, and wrote during the
interval a great many more sonnets than summonses. Unfortunately sonnets
don't pay well, so that his worldly affairs did not progress at any
remarkable ratio. And he only awoke to a sense of his real situation,
when Miss Rivers, having picked a quarrel with him one day in the
Zoological Gardens, announced on the next to her friends that she had
accepted the hand of a bilious East India merchant.

Tom made an awful row about it--grew as attenuated and brown as an
eel--and garnished his conversation with several significant hints about
suicide. He was, however, saved from that ghastly alternative by being
drafted into a Rowing Club, who plied their gondolas daily on the Union
Canal. Hard exercise, beer, and pulling had their usual sanatory effect,
and Tom gradually recovered his health, if not his spirits.

It was at this very crisis that he fell in with this mysterious Miss
Percy. There was an immense hole in his affections which required to be
filled up; and, as nature abhors a vacuum, he plugged it with the image
of Dorothea. The flight, therefore, of the fair levanter, after so brief
an intercourse, was quite enough to upset him. He was in the situation
of a man who is informed over-night that he