say that Ethel is well inclined to Clive?"

"Oh, no--oh dear, no!" But after much cross-examining and a little
blushing on Laura's part, she is brought to confess that she has asked
the Colonel whether he will not come and see Mrs. Mason, who is pining
to see him, and is growing very old. And I find out that she has been to
see this Mrs. Mason; that she and Miss Newcome visited the old lady the
day before yesterday; and Laura thought from the manner in which Ethel
looked at Clive's picture, hanging up in the parlour of his father's old
friend, that she really was very much, etc. etc. So, the letter being
gone, Mrs. Pendennis is most eager about the answer to it, and day after
day examines the bag, and is provoked that it brings no letter bearing
the Brussels post-mark.

Madame de Moncontour seems perfectly well to know what Mrs. Laura has
been doing and is hoping. "What, no letters again to-day? Ain't it
provoking?" she cries. She is in the conspiracy too; and presently
Florac is one of the initiated. "These women wish to bacler a marriage
between the belle miss and le petit Claive," Florac announces to me.
He pays the highest compliments to Miss Newcome's person, as he speaks
regarding the marriage. "I continue to adore your Anglaises," he is
pleased to say. "What of freshness, what of beauty, what roses! And then
they are so adorably good! Go, Pendennis, thou art a happy coquin!" Mr.
Pendennis does not say No. He has won the twenty-thousand-pound prize;
and we know there are worse blanks in that lottery.

CHAPTER LXI. In which we are introduced to a New Newcome

No answer came to Mrs. Pendennis's letter to Colonel Newcome at
Brussels, for the Colonel was absent from that city, and at the time
when Laura wrote was actually in London, whither affairs of his own
had called him. A note from George Warrington acquainted me with this
circumstance; he mentioned that he and the Colonel had dined together
at Bays's on the day previous, and that the Colonel seemed to be in the
highest spirits. High spirits about what? This news put Laura in a
sad perplexity. Should she write and tell him to get his letters from
Brussels? She would in five minutes have found some other pretext for
writing to Colonel Newcome, had not her husband sternly cautioned the
young woman to leave the matter alone.

The more readily perhaps because he had quarrelled with his nephew
Sir Barnes, Thomas Newcome went to visit his brother Hobson an