t
pleasure-place in which it disports? Let no clumsy prying or dull
meddling of ours try to disturb it in our children. Actaeon was a brute
for wanting to push in where Diana was bathing. Leave him occasionally
alone, my good madam, if you have a poet for a child. Even your
admirable advice may be a bore sometimes. You are faultless; but it
does not follow that everybody in your family is to think exactly like
yourself. Yonder little child may have thoughts too deep even for
your great mind, and fancies so coy and timid that they will not bare
themselves when your ladyship sits by.

Helen Pendennis by the force of sheer love divined a great number of
her son's secrets. But she kept these things in her heart (if we may
so speak), and did not speak of them. Besides, she had made up her mind
that he was to marry little Laura, who would be eighteen when Pen was
six-and-twenty: and had finished his college career, and had made
his grand tour, and was settled either in London, astonishing all the
metropolis by his learning and eloquence at the bar, or better still in
a sweet country parsonage surrounded with hollyhocks and roses, close to
a delightful romantic ivy-covered church, from the pulpit of which Pen
would utter the most beautiful sermons ever preached.

While these natural sentiments were waging war and trouble in honest
Pen's bosom, it chanced one day that he rode into Chatteris, for the
purpose of carrying to the County Chronicle a tremendous and thrilling
poem for the next week's paper; and putting up his horse according to
custom, at the stables of the George Hotel there, he fell in with an old
acquaintance. A grand black tandem, with scarlet wheels, came rattling
into the inn yard, as Pen stood there in converse with the hostler about
Rebecca; and the voice of the driver called out, "Hallo, Pendennis,
is that you?" in a loud patronising manner. Pen had some difficulty in
recognising under the broad-brimmed hat and the vast great-coats and
neckcloths, with which the new-comer was habited, the person and figure
of his quondam schoolfellow, Mr. Foker.

A year's absence had made no small difference in that gentleman. A youth
who had been deservedly whipped a few months previously, and who spent
his pocket-money on tarts and hardbake, now appeared before Pen in one
of those costumes to which the public consent, that I take to be quite
as influential in this respect as 'Johnson's Dictionary,' has awarded
the title