“Exactly,” said Forrester.  “I should not have minded turning out somebody else’s child eventually—­(they all did that, didn’t they?)—­for such a piece of luck as to be taken in and done for off-hand, without the trouble of thinking about it.”

Instead of looking vexed, Isabel laughed merrily, and her eyes glittered as they rested on him, full of a proud, loving happiness.

“The best of it was,” Charley went on, “she was in the most dreadful state of alarm and excitement all the way to Dover, looking out at every station, under the impression that she should see the bridegroom there, ‘dangling his bonnet and plume’ (though how he was to have got ahead of us, unless he came by electric telegraph, does not appear).  What sport it would have been!  I should have liked so to have seen the ’laggard in love’ once more.”

“He was not quite that,” Isabel interrupted, rather mischievously.

“Ah!  I dare say you kept him up to the traces,” her husband remarked, languidly.  “You have a talent that way.  What ‘passages,’ as Varney called them, there must have been, eh!  Guy?  We won’t hear your confession now, Puss.  In pity to Mademoiselle Aglaee’s eyes (which are very fine), if not to your own (which are very useful), I think you had better go to bed.  That ferocious vetturino will have us up at unholy hours, and is not to be mitigated.”

We sat talking for a little while after Isabel left us; then Forrester rose and strolled to the window.  The flood of light that poured in when he drew the curtain was quite startling, making the three beaked oil lamps look smoky and dim.

“I shall smoke my last cigar al fresco,” Charley said; “I suppose it’s the correct thing to do, with such a moon as that.  Won’t you come, Guy?  I must not tempt you out into the night air, Hammond.”

“Not to-night,” Livingstone answered.  “I am not in the humor for admiring any thing.  I should be rather in your way.”

One of his gloomy fits was coming over him, at which times he always chose to be alone.

“Well, I shall go and consume the ’humble, but not wholly heart-broken weed of every-day life,’ as Tyrrell used to say. (Don’t you remember his double-barreled adjectives?) If you hear any one singing very sweetly, don’t be alarmed; you’ll know it is the harmless lunatic who now addresses you; the fit won’t last more than an hour.  We shall be in Rome to-morrow.  The only thing on my mind now is whether I shall find any thing there to carry me across the Campagna.  K——­ has a very fair pack, I understand, and no end of foxes.”

Have you ever watched the completion of a photograph, when the nitrate of silver (or whatever the last lotion may be) is applied?  First one feature comes out, that you may indulgently mistake for a tree, or a gable-end, or a mountain top; then another, till the whole picture stands out in clear, brilliant relief.