it must be to be a soldier's
wife! I wonder they have any spirits to dance, and in these dreadful
times of war, too! O Captain Dobbin, I tremble sometimes when I think
of our dearest George, and the dangers of the poor soldier. Are there
many married officers of the --th, Captain Dobbin?"

"Upon my word, she's playing her hand rather too openly," Miss Wirt
thought; but this observation is merely parenthetic, and was not heard
through the crevice of the door at which the governess uttered it.

"One of our young men is just married," Dobbin said, now coming to the
point. "It was a very old attachment, and the young couple are as poor
as church mice." "O, how delightful! O, how romantic!" Miss Osborne
cried, as the Captain said "old attachment" and "poor." Her sympathy
encouraged him.

"The finest young fellow in the regiment," he continued. "Not a braver
or handsomer officer in the army; and such a charming wife! How you
would like her! how you will like her when you know her, Miss
Osborne." The young lady thought the actual moment had arrived, and
that Dobbin's nervousness which now came on and was visible in many
twitchings of his face, in his manner of beating the ground with his
great feet, in the rapid buttoning and unbuttoning of his frock-coat,
&c.--Miss Osborne, I say, thought that when he had given himself a
little air, he would unbosom himself entirely, and prepared eagerly to
listen. And the clock, in the altar on which Iphigenia was situated,
beginning, after a preparatory convulsion, to toll twelve, the mere
tolling seemed as if it would last until one--so prolonged was the
knell to the anxious spinster.

"But it's not about marriage that I came to speak--that is that
marriage--that is--no, I mean--my dear Miss Osborne, it's about our
dear friend George," Dobbin said.

"About George?" she said in a tone so discomfited that Maria and Miss
Wirt laughed at the other side of the door, and even that abandoned
wretch of a Dobbin felt inclined to smile himself; for he was not
altogether unconscious of the state of affairs: George having often
bantered him gracefully and said, "Hang it, Will, why don't you take
old Jane? She'll have you if you ask her. I'll bet you five to two she
will."

"Yes, about George, then," he continued. "There has been a difference
between him and Mr. Osborne. And I regard him so much--for you know
we have been like brothers--that I hope and pray the quarrel may be
settled.