les, "she had quarrelled with Uncle James before she came to us."

"She used to box Rosey's ears," roars out poor Clive, "and go into such
tantrums, in Fitzroy Square and Brussels afterwards, and the pair
would come down with their arms round each other's waists, smirking and
smiling as if they had done nothing but kiss each other all their mortal
lives! This is what we know about women--this is what we get, and find
years afterwards, when we think we have married a smiling, artless young
creature! Are you all such hypocrites, Mrs. Pendennis?" and he pulled
his mustachios in his wrath.

"Poor Clive!" says Laura, very kindly. "You would not have had her tell
tales of her mother, would you?"

"Oh, of course not," breaks out Clive; "that is what you all say, and so
you are hypocrites out of sheer virtue."

It was the first time Laura had called him Clive for many a day. She
was becoming reconciled to him. We had our own opinion about the young
fellow's marriage.

And, to sum up all, upon a casual rencontre with the young gentleman in
question, whom we saw descending from a hansom at the steps of the Flag,
Pall Mall, I opined that dark thoughts of Hoby had entered into Clive
Newcome's mind. Othello-like, he scowled after that unconscious Cassio
as the other passed into the club in his lacquered boots.

CHAPTER LXIV. Absit Omen

At the first of the Blackwall festivals, Hobson Newcome was present, in
spite of the quarrel which had taken place between his elder brother
and the chief of the firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome. But it was
the individual Barnes and the individual Thomas who had had a difference
together; the Bundelcund Bank was not at variance with its chief house
of commission in London; no man drank prosperity to the B. B. C., upon
occasion of this festival, with greater fervour than Hobson Newcome, and
the manner in which he just slightly alluded, in his own little speech
of thanks, to the notorious differences between Colonel Newcome and his
nephew, praying that these might cease some day, and, meanwhile, that
the confidence between the great Indian establishment and its
London agents might never diminish, was appreciated and admired by
six-and-thirty gentlemen, all brimful of claret and enthusiasm, and in
that happy state of mind in which men appreciate and admire everything.

At the second dinner, when the testimonial was presented, Hobson was not
present. Nor did his name figure amongst tho