good humour and discretion in its fondness for
sarcastic sayings, her husband merely smiled
placidly, and patting her hand—gradually
restored to something like its former plump whiteness,
—observed quietly:

"Hoot, hoot, Penny, woman!  We know better.
You're the best-hearted creature betwixt
the Land's End and John o' Groats.  Yer
bark's a deal worse than yer bite, my lassie!"

Within six mouths after his marriage, Mr.
M'Culloch offered his brother-in-law a share in
the business, and the style and title of the firm
became thenceforward M'Culloch and Charlewood.
Clement was thus enabled to offer
Mabel a home, not rich or elegant, but
comfortable, and above the reach of want.  Mrs.
Saxelby was installed again in the old cottage
at Hazlehurst, newly decorated, and somewhat
enlarged, and was able to keep another servant
besides the faithful Betty, who remained with
her in the nominal capacity of parlour-maid, but
who gradually assumed the position towards her
mistress that a prime minister assumes towards
a constitutional sovereign.  Betty—who
enjoyed the immense advantage of being responsible
to no parliament—made the laws, and Mrs.
Saxelby, with a good deal of pomp and
circumstance, endorsed them.  And as Mrs. Saxelby
extremely disliked the trouble of active government,
and Betty much enjoyed it, maid and
mistress jogged on together in the most amicable
fashion possible.  Dooley, now grown strong,
and arrived at that glorious stage in life's march
when knickerbockers are a part of the daily
costume, lived and throve, and was already
looking forward to the time when he should be
entered at the Hammerham Grammar School,
and become a great scholar, and get an
exhibition and go to college.  All which duly befel.
And it has been whispered to me lately, that as
soon as Julian Saxelby, Esq., is called to the
bar, a marriage may be expected to take place
between him and the bright-eyed, flaxen-haired
Jeanie, only daughter of Donald M'Culloch,
Esq., of the Hawthorns, Highgate, and Penelope
his wife.

Augusta was so much offended at her sister's
marriage "to a tradesman," as she said with
just indignation, and so piously shocked at
Clement's engagement to a person who had not
only performed on a public stage, but who (as
Augusta had been able to ascertain on good
authority) absolutely had devoted nearly the
whole of the money so earned to her own family,
instead of bringing it as a marriage-portion to
her husband, which was a piece of cold-hearted
iniquity altogether unforgivable, that she
declined to hold any further communication with
those degenerate scions of the house of Charlewood.
Except—it is well to be just—in so
far as sending them a large bundle, per book
post, of her husband's sermons, printed, by
subscription, on highly glazed cream-coloured
paper, and intended for private circulation only.
Geraldine O'Brien was abroad with Lady Popham
at the time of Mabel's marriage, but she
wrote the latter a warm-hearted letter, full of
good wishes, adding to them Lady Popham's
kindest remembrances.  "Godmamma is
wonderfully well," she wrote, "and has, I think,
quite got over the shock of the handsome
Alfred's bad behaviour.  She has found a new
protégé—a Tyrolese who plays the guitar,
and who fills our apartment here in Vienna with
a kind of tinkling hum, like fifty thousand
musical grasshoppers made of fine steel!  I say
nothing of the clouds he puffs from his
meerschaum, nor of the odours of garlic which hang
around him perennially.  However, he is a harmless
creature, and strums away peacefully without
hurting any one."  At the close of the
letter came a little postscript—"for Mabel
alone."  "You are a fortunate woman, and have
got the best man in the world.  Make much of
him, and be very happy.  The latter wish is not
the less sincerely uttered that I was once a little
—just the 'laste taste in loife,' as they say at
Kilclare—in love with your husband.  But he?
—ah no; be quite easy. I know now, and I
suspected then, that there was one little slip of a
girl who stood between him and all other
women.  He loved you always, truly and faithfully.
Be grateful to him, and think sometimes
of your sincere friend, G. O'B."

Mr. Alaric Allen was dreadfully disgusted
by Mabel's announcement that she intended
to leave his theatre, and the stage altogether,
at the close of her second London season.

"It is too bad," he said, confidentially, to
some friends, "altogether too bad!  A girl
who had the ball at her foot, a girl who might
have made the greatest reputation—ay, and
the greatest fortune—of any actress since Fanny
Kemble, to throw it all away in this manner!
And she is not even making a good marriage,
as I hear.  Some trading fellow or other, whom
she knew in her early youth at Hammerham.
A wretched business.  But that is the worst of
women, as I often say.  The cleverest of them
—and this girl is very clever, in fact is, in
certain things, an undoubted genius—but the
very cleverest of them are such fools!"

Of the rest of the personages whose lives
were more or less involved with Mabel's, or
who had any influence on her career, there
remains not much to say.  Mr. Trescott, utterly
lost and wretched after his child's death, became
a confirmed drunkard, and sank lower and lower,
until at length he was almost totally unfitted
for the exercise of his profession, and became
a pensioner on the bounty of a few persons,
who were kind to him for little Corda's sake.
Among these, Jerry Shaw was to be counted.
The queer old man gave out of his poverty to
the wretched drunkard, who came, with tearful
eyes and quivering voice, to talk to him by the
hour of his "lost angel."  And many were the
serious harangues with which Jerry favoured
Lingo on the evils of drunkenness; harangues
to which Lingo appeared to listen with an
argumentative, unconvinced air, one eye blinking
slyly, as who should say, "It's all very well;
I let you go on for the present, but I mean to
pose you by-and-by!"