“Marry you, George?” replied Susan, opening her eyes; “why, never!  I shall never marry any one after—­you must be well aware of that.”  Susan proceeded to inform George, that, though foolishness was a part of her character, selfishness was not; recent events had destroyed an agreeable delusion under which she had imagined herself worthy to be Mrs. George Fielding; she therefore, though with some reluctance, intended to resign that situation to some wiser and better woman than she had turned out.  In this agreeable resolution she persisted, varying it occasionally with little showers of tears unaccompanied by the slightest convulsion of the muscles of the face.  But, as I am not, like George Fielding, in love with Susan Merton, or with self-deception (another’s), I spare the reader all the pretty things this young lady said and believed and did, to postpone her inevitable happiness.  Yes, inevitable, for this sort of thing never yet kept lovers long apart since the world was, except in a novel worse than common.  I will but relate how that fine fellow, George, dried “these foolish drops” on one occasion.

“Susan,” said he, “if I had found you going to be married to another man with the roses on your cheek, I should have turned on my heel and back to Australia.  But a look in your face was enough; you were miserable, and any old fool could see your heart was dead against it; look at you now blooming like a rose, so what is the use of us two fighting against human nature? we can’t be happy apart—­let us come together.”

“Ah!  George, if I thought your happiness depended on having—­a foolish wife—­”

“Why, you know it does,” replied the inadvertent Agricola.

“That alters the case; sooner than you should be unhappy—­I think—­I—­”

“Name the day, then.”

In short the bells rang a merry peal, and to reconcile Susan to her unavoidable happiness, Mr. Eden came down and gave an additional weight (in her way of viewing things) to the marriage ceremony by officiating.  It must be owned that this favorable circumstance cost her a few tears, too.

How so, Mr. Reade?

Marry, sir, thus:  Mr. Eden was what they call eccentric; among his other deviations from usage he delivered the meaning of sentences in church along with the words.

This was a thunder-clap to poor Susan.  She had often heard a chanting machine utter the marriage service all on one note, and heard it with a certain smile of unintelligent complacency her sex wear out of politeness; but when the man Eden told her at the altar with simple earnestness what a high and deep and solemn contract she was making then and there with God and man, she began to cry, and wept like April through the ceremony.

I have not quite done with this pair, but leave them a few minutes, for some words are due to other characters, and to none, I think, more than to this very Mr. Eden, whose zeal and wisdom brought our hero and unheroine happily together through the subtle sequence of causes I have related, the prime thread a converted thief.