ursuit of our own business
in life through the Strand, at the Club, nay at church itself, we cannot
help peeping at the shops on the way, or at our neighbour's dinner, or
at the faces under the bonnets in the next pew.

Very many years after the circumstances about which we are at present
occupied, Laura, with a blush and a laugh showing much humour, owned
to having read a French novel once much in vogue, and when her husband
asked her, wondering where on earth she could have got such a volume,
she owned that it was in the Temple, when she lived in Mr. Percy
Sibwright's chambers.

"And, also, I never confessed," she said, "on that same occasion, what
I must now own to: that I opened the japanned box, and took out that
strange-looking wig inside it, and put it on and looked at myself in the
glass in it."

Suppose Percy Sibwright had come in at such a moment as that? What
would he have said,--the enraptured rogue? What would have been all the
pictures of disguised beauties in his room compared to that living one?
Ah, we are speaking of old times, when Sibwright was a bachelor and
before he got a county court,--when people were young--when most people
were young. Other people are young now; but we no more.

When Miss Laura played this prank with the wig, you can't suppose that
Pen could have been very ill upstairs; otherwise, though she had grown
to care for him ever so little, common sense of feeling and decorum
would have prevented her from performing any tricks or trying any
disguises.

But all sorts of events had occurred in the course of the last few
days which had contributed to increase or account for her gaiety, and a
little colony of the reader's old friends and acquaintances was by this
time established in Lamb Court, Temple, and round Pen's sick-bed there.
First, Martha, Mrs. Pendennis's servant, had arrived from Fairoaks,
being summoned thence by the Major who justly thought her presence would
be comfortable and useful to her mistress and her young master, for
neither of whom the constant neighbourhood of Mrs. Flanagan (who during
Pen's illness required more spirituous consolation than ever to support
her) could be pleasant. Martha then made her appearance in due season
to wait upon Mr. Pendennis, nor did that lady go once to bed until the
faithful servant had reached her, when, with a heart full of maternal
thankfulness she went and lay down upon Warrington's straw mattress, and
among his mathematical bo