ted with them here on
a sudden, and without so much as a shake of the hand? Is yonder line
(----) which I drew with my own pen, a barrier between me and Hades as
it were, across which I can see those figures retreating and only dimly
glimmering? Before taking leave of Mr. Arthur Pendennis, might he
not have told us whether Miss Ethel married anybody finally? It was
provoking that he should retire to the shades without answering that
sentimental question.

But though he has disappeared as irrevocably as Eurydice, these minor
questions may settle the major one above mentioned. How could Pendennis
have got all that information about Ethel's goings-on at Baden, and with
Lord Kew, unless she had told somebody--her husband, for instance, who,
having made Pendennis an early confidant in his amour, gave him the
whole story? Clive, Pendennis writes expressly, is travelling abroad
with his wife. Who is that wife? By a most monstrous blunder, Mr.
Pendennis killed Lord Farintosh's mother at one page and brought her to
life again at another; but Rosey, who is so lately consigned to Kensal
Green, it is not surely with her that Clive is travelling, for then Mrs.
Mackenzie would probably be with them to a live certainty, and the tour
would be by no means pleasant. How could Pendennis have got all those
private letters, etc., but that the Colonel kept them in a teak box,
which Clive inherited and made over to his friend? My belief then is,
that in Fable-land somewhere Ethel and Clive are living most comfortably
together: that she is immensely fond of his little boy, and a great deal
happier now than they would have been had they married at first, when
they took a liking to each other as young people. That picture of
J. J.'s of Mrs. Clive Newcome (in the Crystal Palace Exhibition in
Fable-land), is certainly not in the least like Rosey, who we read was
fair; but it represents a tall, handsome, dark lady, who must be Mrs.
Ethel.

Again, why did Pendennis introduce J. J. with such a flourish, giving
us, as it were, an overture, and no piece to follow it? J. J.'s history,
let me confidentially state, has been revealed to me too, and may be
told some of these fine summer months, or Christmas evenings, when the
kind reader has leisure to hear.

What about Sir Barnes Newcome ultimately? My impression is that he is
married again, and it is my fervent hope that his present wife bullies
him. Mrs. Mackenzie cannot have the face to keep that mon