But Gainsford persisted, upon which there was fooling.  All this was too childish for Sir Purcell to think it necessary to give warning of his presence.  They passed, and when they had gone a short way the damsel cried, “Well, that is something,” and stopped.  “Married in a month!” she exclaimed.  “And you don’t know which one?”

“No,” returned Gainsford; “master said ‘one of you’ as they was at dinner, just as I come into the room.  He was in jolly spirits, and kept going so:  ‘What’s a month! champagne, Gainsford,’ and you should have sees Mrs.—­not Stump, but Chump.  She’ll be tipsy to-night, and I shall bust if I have to carry of her upstairs.  Well, she is fun!—­she don’t mind handin’ you a five-shilling piece when she’s done tender:  but I have nearly lost my place two or three time along of that woman.  She’d split logs with laughing:—­no need of beetle and wedges!  ‘Och!’ she sings out, ’by the piper!’—­and Miss Cornelia sitting there—­and, ’Arrah!’—­bother the woman’s Irish,” (thus Gainsford gave up the effort at imitation, with a spirited Briton’s mild contempt for what he could not do) “she pointed out Miss Cornelia and said she was like the tinker’s dog:—­there’s the bone he wants himself, and the bone he don’t want anybody else to have.  Aha! ain’t it good?”

“Oh! the tinker’s dog! won’t I remember that!” said the damsel, “she can’t be such a fool.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Gainsford meditated critically.  “She is; and yet she ain’t, if you understand me.  What I feel about her is—­hang it! she makes ye laugh.”

Sir Purcell moved from the shadow of the tree as noiselessly as he could, so that this enamoured couple might not be disturbed.  He had already heard more than he quite excused himself for hearing in such a manner, and having decided not to arrest the man and make him relate exactly what Mr. Pole had spoken that evening at the Brookfield dinner-table, he hurried on his return to town.

It was not till he had sight of his poor home; the solitary company of chairs; the sofa looking bony and comfortless as an old female house drudge; the table with his desk on it; and, through folding-doors, his cold and narrow bed; not till then did the fact of his great loss stand before him, and accuse him of living.  He seated himself methodically and wrote to Cornelia.  His fancy pictured her now as sharp to every turn of language and fall of periods:  and to satisfy his imagined, rigorous critic, he wrote much in the style of a newspaper leading article.  No one would have thought that tragic meaning underlay those choice and sounding phrases.  On reperusing the composition, he rejected it, but only to produce one of a similar cast.  He could not get to nature in his tone.  He spoke aloud a little sentence now and then, that had the ring of a despairing tenderness.  Nothing of the sort inhabited his written words, wherein a strained philosophy and ironic resignation went on stilts.  “I should desire to see you once