tched father stops in some indifferent speech he was trying to make.
"I can't help myself," he groans out; "my wife is so ill, she can't
attend to the child. Mrs. Mackenzie manages the house for me--and--here!
Tommy, Tommy! papa is coming!" Tommy has been crying again; and flinging
open the studio door, Clive calls out, and dashes upstairs.

I hear scuffling, stamping, loud voices, poor Tommy's scared little
pipe--Clive's fierce objurgations, and the Campaigner's voice barking
out--"Do, sir, do! with my child suffering in the next room. Behave
like a brute to me, do. He shall not go! He shall not have the hat"--"He
shall"--"Ah--ah!" A scream is heard. It is Clive tearing a child's
hat out of the Campaigner's hands, with which, and a flushed face, he
presently rushes downstairs, bearing little Tommy on his shoulder.

"You see what I am come to, Pen," he says with a heartbroken voice,
trying, with hands all of a tremble, to tie the hat on the boy's head.
He laughs bitterly at the ill success of his endeavours. "Oh, you silly
papa!" laughs Tommy, too.

The door is flung open, and the red-faced Campaigner appears. Her face
is mottled with wrath, her bandeaux of hair are disarranged upon her
forehead, the ornaments of her cap, cheap, and dirty, and numerous, only
give her a wilder appearance. She is in a large and dingy wrapper, very
different from the lady who had presented herself a few months back to
my wife--how different from the smiling Mrs. Mackenzie of old days!

"He shall not go out of a winter day, sir," she breaks out. "I have
his mother's orders, whom you are killing. Mr. Pendennis!" She starts,
perceiving me for the first time, and her breast heaves, and she
prepares for combat, and looks at me over her shoulder.

"You and his father are the best judges upon this point, ma'am," said
Mr. Pendennis, with a bow.

"The child is delicate, sir," cries Mrs. Mackenzie; "and this
winter----"

"Enough of this," says Clive with a stamp, and passes through her guard
with Tommy, and we descend the stairs, and at length are in the free
street. Was it not best not to describe at full length this portion of
poor Clive's history?

CHAPTER LXXVI. Christmas at Rosebury

We have known our friend Florac under two aristocratic names, and might
now salute him by a third, to which he was entitled, although neither he
nor his wife ever chose to assume it. His father was lately dead, and
M. Paul de Florac might sign him