two ladies came out, they found together the Pendennises, uncle
and nephew, and Harry Foker, Esquire, sucking the crook of his
stick, standing there in the sunshine. To see and to ask to eat were
simultaneous with the good-natured Begum, and she invited the three
gentlemen to luncheon straightway.

Blanche was, too, particularly gracious. "O! do come," she said to
Arthur, "if you are not too great a man. I want so to talk to you
about--but we mustn't say what, here, you know. What would Mr.
Oriel say?" And the young devotee jumped into the carriage after her
mamma.--"I've read every word of it. It's adorable," she added, still
addressing herself to Pen.

"I know who is," said Mr. Arthur, making rather a pert bow.

"What's the row about?" asked Mr. Foker, rather puzzled.

"I suppose Miss Clavering means 'Walter Lorraine,'" said the Major,
looking knowing, and nodding at Pen.

"I suppose so, sir. There was a famous review in the Pall Mall this
morning. It was Warrington's doing though, and I must not be too proud."

"A review in Pall Mall?--Walter Lorraine? What the doose do you mean?"
Foker asked. "Walter Lorraine died of the measles, poor little beggar,
when we were at Grey Friars. I remember his mother coming up."

"You are not a literary man, Foker," Pen said, laughing, and hooking his
arm into his friend's. "You must know I have been writing a novel, and
some of the papers have spoken very well of it. Perhaps you don't read
the Sunday Papers?"

"I read Bell's Life regular, old boy," Mr Foker answered: at which Pen
laughed again, and the three gentlemen proceeded in great good-humour to
Lady Clavering's house.

The subject of the novel was resumed after luncheon by Miss Amory, who
indeed loved poets and men of letters if she loved anything, and was
sincerely an artist in feeling. "Some of the passages in the book made
me cry, positively they did," she said.

Pen said, with some fatuity, "I am happy to think I have a part of vos
larmes, Miss Blanche,"--and the Major (who had not read more than six
pages of Pen's book) put on his sanctified look, saying, "Yes, there
are some passages quite affecting, mons'ous affecting:" and,--"Oh, if
it makes you cry,"--Lady Amory declared she would not read it, "that she
wouldn't."

"Don't, mamma," Blanche said, with a French shrug of her shoulders;
and then she fell into a rhapsody about the book, about the snatches of
poetry interspersed in it about the two heroines, L