at they also read it privately and separately,
for when the widow came out of her room in her dressing-gown at one
o'clock in the morning with volume two, which she had finished, she
found Laura devouring volume three in bed. Laura did not say much
about the book, but Helen pronounced that it was a happy mixture of
Shakspeare, and Byron, and Walter Scott, and was quite certain that her
son was the greatest genius, as he was the best son, in the world.

Did Laura not think about the book and the author, although she said so
little? At least she thought about Arthur Pendennis. Kind as his tone
was, it vexed her. She did not like his eagerness to repay that money.
She would rather that her brother had taken her gift as she intended it:
and was pained that there should be money calculations between them.
His letters from London, written with the good-natured wish to amuse
his mother, were full of descriptions of the famous people and the
entertainments and magnificence of the great city. Everybody was
flattering him and spoiling him, she was sure. Was he not looking to
some great marriage, with that cunning uncle for a Mentor (between whom
and Laura there was always an antipathy), that inveterate worldling,
whose whole thoughts were bent upon pleasure and rank and fortune? He
never alluded to--to old times, when he spoke of her. He had forgotten
them and her, perhaps had he not forgotten other things and people?

These thoughts may have passed in Miss Laura's mind, though she did not,
she could not, confide them to Helen. She had one more secret, too, from
that lady, which she could not divulge, perhaps because she knew how the
widow would have rejoiced to know it. This regarded an event which had
occurred during that visit to Lady Rockminster, which Laura had paid in
the last Christmas holidays: when Pen was at home with his mother, and
when Mr. Pynsent, supposed to be so cold and so ambitious, had formally
offered his hand to Miss Bell. No one except herself and her admirer
knew of this proposal: or that Pynsent had been rejected by her, and
probably the reasons she gave to the mortified young man himself were
not those which actuated her refusal, or those which she chose to
acknowledge to herself. "I never," she told Pynsent, "can accept such an
offer as that which you make me, which you own is unknown to your family
as I am sure it would be unwelcome to them. The difference of rank
between us is too great. You are very