that his story was a failure; his voice
sank and dwindled away dismally at the end of it--flickered, and went
out; and it was all dark again. You could hear the ticket-porter, who
lolls about Shepherd's Inn, as he passed on the flags under the archway:
the clink of his boot-heels was noted by everybody.

"You were coming to see me, sir," Mr. Bows said. "Won't you have the
kindness to walk up to my chambers with me? You do them a great honour,
I am sure. They are rather high up; but----"

"Oh! I live in a garret myself, and Shepherd's Inn is twice as cheerful
as Lamb Court," Mr. Pendennis broke in.

"I knew that you had third-floor apartments," Mr. Bows said; "and was
going to say--you will please not take my remark as discourteous--that
the air up three pair of stairs is wholesomer for gentlemen, than the
air of a porter's lodge."

"Sir!" said Pen, whose candle flamed up again in his wrath, and who was
disposed to be as quarrelsome as men are when they are in the wrong.
"Will you permit me to choose my society without----?

"You were so polite as to say that you were about to honour my umble
domicile with a visit," Mr. Bows said, with his sad voice. "Shall I show
you the way? Mr. Pendennis and I are old friends, Mrs. Bolton--very
old acquaintances; and at the earliest dawn of his life we crossed each
other."

The old man pointed towards the door with a trembling finger, and a hat
in the other hand, and in an attitude slightly theatrical; so were his
words when he spoke somewhat artificial, and chosen from the vocabulary
which he had heard all his life from the painted lips of the orators
before the stage-lamps. But he was not acting or masquerading, as Pen
knew very well, though he was disposed to pooh-pooh the old fellow's
melodramatic airs. "Come along, sir," he said, "as you are so very
pressing. Mrs. Bolton, I wish you a good day. Good-bye, Miss Fanny; I
shall always think of our night at Vauxhall with pleasure; and be sure
I will remember the theatre tickets." And he took her hand, pressed it,
was pressed by it, and was gone.

"What a nice young man, to be sure!" cried Mrs. Bolton.

"D'you think so, ma?" said Fanny.

"I was a-thinkin who he was like. When I was at the Wells with Mrs.
Serle," Mrs. Bolton continued, looking through the window-curtain after
Pen, as he went up the court with Bows, "there was a young gentleman
from the city, that used to come in a tilbry, in a white at, the very
image of him