his woman! Marry at eighteen an actress of
thirty--bah bah!--I would as soon he sent into the kitchen and married
the cook."

"I know the evils of premature engagements," sighed out Helen: and as
she has made this allusion no less than thrice in the course of the
above conversation, and seems to be so oppressed with the notion of long
engagements and unequal marriages, and as the circumstance we have
to relate will explain what perhaps some persons are anxious to know,
namely who little Laura is, who has appeared more than once before us,
it will be as well to clear up these points in another chapter.

CHAPTER VIII. In which Pen is kept waiting at the Door, while the Reader
is informed who little Laura was.

Once upon a time, then, there was a young gentleman of Cambridge
University who came to pass the long vacation at the village where
young Helen Thistlewood was living with her mother, the widow of the
lieutenant slain at Copenhagen. This gentleman, whose name was
the Reverend Francis Bell, was nephew to Mrs. Thistlewood, and by
consequence, own cousin to Miss Helen, so that it was very right that he
should take lodgings in his aunt's house, who lived in a very small way;
and there he passed the long vacation, reading with three or four pupils
who accompanied him to the village. Mr. Bell was fellow of a college,
and famous in the University for his learning and skill as a tutor.

His two kinswomen understood pretty early that the reverend gentleman
was engaged to be married, and was only waiting for a college living to
enable him to fulfil his engagement. His intended bride was the daughter
of another parson, who had acted as Mr. Bell's own private tutor in
Bell's early life, and it was whilst under Mr. Coacher's roof, indeed,
and when only a boy of seventeen or eighteen years of age, that the
impetuous young Bell had flung himself at the feet of Miss Martha
Coacher, whom he was helping to pick peas in the garden. On his knees,
before those peas and her, he pledged himself to an endless affection.

Miss Coacher was by many years the young fellow's senior and her
own heart had been lacerated by many previous disappointments in the
matrimonial line. No less than three pupils of her father had trifled
with those young affections. The apothecary of the village had
despicably jilted her. The dragoon officer, with whom she had danced so
many many times during that happy season which she passed at Bath with
her