like my husband when he is
kind best; and don't wonder at your having made a stupid speech at the
dinner, as you say you did, when you had this other subject to think of.
That is a beautiful psalm, Pen, and those verses which you were reading
when you saw him, especially beautiful."

"But in the presence of eighty old gentlemen, who have all come to
decay, and have all had to beg their bread in a manner, don't you think
the clergyman might choose some other psalm?" asks Mr. Pendennis.

"They were not forsaken utterly, Arthur," says Mrs. Laura, gravely:
but rather declines to argue the point raised by me; namely, that the
selection of that especial thirty-seventh psalm was not complimentary to
those decayed old gentlemen.

"All the psalms are good, sir," she says, "and this one, of course, is
included," and thus the discussion closed.

I then fell to a description of Howland Street, and poor Clive, whom
I had found there over his work. A dubious maid scanned my appearance
rather eagerly when I asked to see him. I found a picture-dealer
chaffering with him over a bundle of sketches, and his little boy,
already pencil in hand, lying in one corner of the room, the sun playing
about his yellow hair. The child looked languid and pale, the father
worn and ill. When the dealer at length took his bargains away, I
gradually broke my errand to Clive, and told him from whence I had just
come.

He had thought his father in Scotland with Lord H.: and was immensely
moved with the news which I brought.

"I haven't written to him for a month. It's not pleasant the letters I
have to write, Pen, and I can't make them pleasant. Up, Tommykin, and
put on your cap." Tommykin jumps up. "Put on your cap, and tell them to
take off your pinafore, tell grandmamma----"

At that name Tommykin begins to cry.

"Look at that!" says Clive, commencing to speak in the French language,
which the child interrupts by calling out in that tongue. "I speak also
French, papa."

"Well, my child! You will like to come out with papa, and Betsy can
dress you." He flings off his own paint-stained shooting-jacket as he
talks, takes a frock-coat out of a carved wardrobe, and a hat from a
helmet on the shelf. He is no longer the handsome splendid boy of
old times. Can that be Clive, with that haggard face and slouched
handkerchief? "I am not the dandy I was, Pen," he says bitterly.

A little voice is heard crying overhead--and giving a kind of gasp the
wre