essenger was put in ceaseless requisition, and his donkey must
have been worn off his little legs with trotting to and fro between the
two houses, Laura was quite anxious and hurt at not hearing from the
Colonel; it was a shame that he did not have over his letters from
Belgium and answer that one which she had honoured him by writing. By
some information, received who knows how? our host was aware of the
intrigue which Mrs. Pendennis was carrying on; and his little wife
almost as much interested in it as my own. She whispered to me in her
kind way that she would give a guinea, that she would, to see a certain
couple made happy together; that they were born for one another, that
they were; she was for having me go off to fetch Clive: but who was I
to act as Hymen's messenger, or to interpose in such delicate family
affairs?

All this while Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., remained absent in London,
attending to his banking duties there, and pursuing the dismal inquiries
which ended, in the ensuing Michaelmas term, in the famous suit of
Newcome v. Lord Highgate. Ethel, pursuing the plan which she had laid
down for herself from the first, took entire charge of his children and
house: Lady Anne returned to her own family: never indeed having been of
much use in her son's dismal household. My wife talked to me of course
about her pursuits and amusements at Newcome, in the ancestral hall
which we have mentioned. The children played and ate their dinner (mine
often partook of his infantine mutton, in company with little Clara and
the poor young heir of Newcome) in the room which had been called my
lady's own, and in which her husband had locked her, forgetting that the
conservatories were open, through which the hapless woman had fled. Next
to this was the baronial library, a side of which was fitted with the
gloomy books from Clapham, which old Mrs. Newcome had amassed; rows of
tracts, and missionary magazines, and dingy quarto volumes of worldly
travel and history which that lady had admitted into her collection.

Almost on the last day of our stay at Rosebury, the two young ladies
bethought them of paying a visit to the neighbouring town of Newcome, to
that old Mrs. Mason who has been mentioned in a foregoing page in some
yet earlier chapter of our history. She was very old now, very faithful
to the recollections of her own early time, and oblivious of yesterday.
Thanks to Colonel Newcome's bounty, she had lived in comfort for m