ich
succeeded the passionate outbreak of the Major, George's deep voice, as
it here broke trembling into the twilight room, was heard with no small
emotion by all.

"Will you let me tell you something about myself, my kind friends?" he
said,--"you have been so good to me, ma'am, you have been so kind to me,
Laura--I hope I may call you so sometimes--my dear Pen and I have been
such friends that I have long wanted to tell you my story such as it
is, and would have told it to you earlier but that it is a sad one and
contains another's secret. However, it may do good for Arthur to know
it--it is that every one here should. It will divert you from thinking
about a subject, which, out of a fatal misconception, has caused a great
deal of pain to all of you. May I please tell you, Mrs. Pendennis?"

"Pray speak," was all Helen said; and indeed she was not much heeding;
her mind was full of another idea with which Pen's words had supplied
her, and she was in a terror of hope that what he had hinted might be as
she wished.

George filled himself a bumper of wine and emptied it, and began to
speak. "You all of you know how you see me," he said, "a man without a
desire to make an advance in the world: careless about reputation; and
living in a garret and from hand to mouth, though I have friends and a
name, and I daresay capabilities of my own, that would serve me if I had
a mind. But mind I have none. I shall die in that garret most likely,
and alone. I nailed myself to that doom in early life. Shall I tell
you what it was that interested me about Arthur years ago, and made me
inclined towards him when first I saw him? The men from our college at
Oxbridge brought up accounts of that early affair with the Chatteris
actress, about whom Pen has talked to me since; and who, but for the
Major's generalship, might have been your daughter-in-law, ma'am. I
can't see Pen in the dark, but he blushes, I'm sure; and I dare say Miss
Bell does; and my friend Major Pendennis, I dare say, laughs as he ought
to do--for he won. What would have been Arthur's lot now had he been
tied at nineteen to an illiterate woman older than himself, with no
qualities in common between them to make one a companion for the other,
no equality, no confidence, and no love speedily? What could he have
been but most miserable? And when he spoke just now and threatened a
similar union, be sure it was but a threat occasioned by anger, which
you must give me leave to s