So Mr. Pen and Miss Laura found the society at Clavering Park an uncommonly agreeable resort of summer evenings. Blanche vowed that she raffoled of Laura; and, very likely, Mr. Pen was pleased with Blanche. His spirits came back: he laughed and rattled till Laura wondered to hear him. It was not the same Pen, yawning in a shooting-jacket, in the Fairoaks parlor, who appeared alert and brisk, and smiling, and well dressed, in Lady Clavering's drawing-room. Sometimes they had music. Laura had a sweet contralto voice, and sang with Blanche, who had had the best continental instruction, and was charmed to be her friend's mistress. Sometines Mr. Pen joined in these concerts, or oftener looked sweet upon Miss Blanche as she sang. Sometimes they had glees, when Captain Strong's chest was of vast service, and he boomed out in a prodigious bass, of which he was not a little proud.

"Good fellow, Strong - ain't he, Miss Bell?" Sir Francis would say to her. "Plays at écarté with Lady Clavering — plays anything, pitch and toss, pianoforty, cwibbage if you like. How long do you think he's been staying with me? He came for a week with a carpet-bag, and gad, he's been staying thwee years. Good fellow, ain't he? Don't know how he gets a shillin', though, by Jove I don't, Miss Lauwa."

And yet the Chevalier, if he lost his money to Lady Clavering, always paid it; and if he lived with his friend for three years, paid for that too-in good-humor, in kindness and joviality, in a thousand little services by which he made himself agreeable. What gentleman could want a better friend than a man who was always in spirits, never in the way or out of it, and was ready to execute any commission for his patron, whether it was to sing a song or meet a lawyer, to fight a duel, or to carve a capon?

Although Laura and Pen commonly went to Clavering Park together, yet sometimes Mr. Pen took walks there unattended by her, and about which he did not tell her. He took to fish

ing the Brawl, which runs through the Park, and passes not very far from the garden-wall; and by the oddest coincidence, Miss Amory would walk out (having been to look at her flowers), and would be quite surprised to see Mr. Pendennis fishing.

I wonder what trout Pen caught while the young lady was looking on? or whether Miss Blanche was the pretty little fish which played round his fly, and which Mr. Pen was endeavoring

to hook?

As for Miss Blanche, she had a kind heart; and having, as

she owned, herself "suffered" a good deal in the course of her brief life and experience why, she could compassionate other susceptible beings like Pen, who had suffered too. Her love for Laura and that dear Mrs. Pendennis redoubled: if they were not at the Park, she was not easy unless she herself was at Fairoaks. She played with Laura; she read French and German with Laura; and Mr. Pen read French and German along with them. He turned sentimental ballads of Schiller and Goethe into English verse for the ladies, and Blanche unlocked "Mes Larmes for him, and imparted to him some of the plaintive outpourings of her own tender Muse.

It appeared from these poems that the young creature had indeed suffered prodigiously. She was familiar with the idea of suicide. Death she repeatedly longed for. A faded rose

inspired her with such grief that you would have thought she must die in pain of it. It was a wonder how a young creature should have suffered so much should have found the means of getting at such an ocean of despair and passion (as a runaway boy who will get to sea), and having embarked on it, should survive it. What a talent she must have had for weeping to be able to pour out so many of “ Mes Larmes!"

They were not particularly briny, Miss Blanche's tears, that is the truth: but Pen, who read her verses, thought them very well for a lady- and wrote some verses himself for her. His were very violent and passionate, very hot, sweet, and strong: and he not only wrote verses; but - Oh, the villain! Oh, the deceiver! he altered and adapted former poems in his possession, and which had been composed for a certain Miss Emily Fotheringay, for the use and to the Christian name of Miss Blanche Amory.

CHAPTER XXIII.

A LITTLE INNOCENT.

"EGAD, Strong," one day the Baronet said, as the pair were conversing after dinner over the billiard-table, and that great unbosomer of secrets, a cigar; "Egad, Strong, I wish to the doose your wife was dead.”

"So do I. That's a cannon, by Jove! But she won't; she'll live for ever you see if she don't. Why do you

wish her off the hooks, Frank, my boy?" asked Captain Strong.

"Because then you might marry Missy. She ain't badlooking. She'll have ten thousand. and that's a good bit of money for such a poor old devil as you," drawled out the other gentleman. And egad, Strong, I hate her worse and worse every day. I can't stand her, Strong; by gad, I can't.”

"I wouldn't take her at twice the figure," Captain Strong said, laughing. "I never saw such a little devil in my life." "I should like to poison her," said the sententious Baronet; "by Jove I should."

Why, what has she been at now?" asked his friend.

"Nothing particular," answered Sir Francis; only her old tricks. That girl has such a knack of making everybody miserable that, hang me, it's quite surprising. Last night she sent the governess crying away from the dinner-table. Afterwards, as I was passing Frank's room, I heard the poor little beggar howling in the dark, and found his sister had been frightening his soul out of his body, by telling him stories about the ghost that's in the house. At lunch she gave my lady a turn; and though my wife's a fool, she's a good soul I'm hanged if she ain't."

"What did Missy do to her?" Strong asked.

"Why, hang me, if she didn't begin talking about the late Amory, my predecessor," the Baronet said, with a grin. "She got some picture out of the Keepsake,' and said, she was sure it was like her dear father. She wanted to know where her

father's grave was. Hang her father! Whenever Miss Amory talks about him, Lady Clavering always bursts out crying: and the little devil will talk about him in order to spite her mother. To-day when she began, I got in a confounded rage, said I was her father, and—and that sort of thing, and then, sir, she took a shy at me."

And what did she say about you, Frank?" Mr. Strong, still laughing, inquired of his friend and patron.

"Gad, she said I wasn't her father; that I wasn't fit to comprehend her; that her father must have been a man of genius, and fine feelings, and that sort of thing; whereas I had married her mother for money."

"Well, didn't you?" asked Strong.

"I

"It don't make it any the pleasanter to hear because it's true, don't you know," Sir Francis Clavering answered. ain't a literary man and that; but I ain't such a fool as she makes me out. I don't know how it is, but she always man

ages to to put me in the hole, don't you understand. She turns all the house round her in her quiet way, and with her confounded sentimental airs. I wish she was dead, Ned.”

"It was my wife whom you wanted dead just now," Strong said, always in perfect good-humor; upon which the Baronet, with his accustomed candor, said, "Well, when people bore my life out, I do wish they were dead, and I wish Missy were down a well with all my heart."

Thus it will be seen from the above report of this candid conversation that our accomplished little friend had some peculiarities or defects of character which rendered her not very popular. She was a young lady of some genius, exquisite sympathies and considerable literary attainments, living, like many another genius, with relatives who could not comprehend her. Neither her mother nor her step-father were persons of a literary turn." Bell's Life" and the Racing Calendar" were the extent of the Baronet's reading, and Lady Clavering still wrote like a school-girl of thirteen, and with an extraordinary disregard to grammar and spelling. And as Miss Amory felt very keenly that she was not appreciated, and that she lived with persons who were not her equals in intellect or conversational power, she lost no opportunity to acquaint her family circle with their inferiority to herself, and not only was a martyr, but took care to let everybody know that she was so. If she suffered, as she said and thought she did, severely, are we to wonder that a young creature of such delicate sensibilities should shriek and cry out a good deal? If a poetess may not bemoan her lot, of what earthly use is her lyre? Blanche struck hers only to the saddest of tunes; and sang elegies over her dead hopes, dirges over her early frost-nipt buds of affection, as became such a melancholy fate and Muse.

Her actual distresses, as we have said, had not been up to the present time very considerable: but her griefs lay, like those of most of us, in her own soul- that being sad and habitually dissatisfied, what wonder that she should weep? So" Mes Larmes" dribbled out of her eyes any day at command: she could furnish an unlimited supply of tears, and her faculty of shedding them increased by practice. For sentiment is like another complaint mentioned by Horace, as increasing by self-indulgence (I am sorry to say, ladies, that the complaint in question is called the dropsy), and the more you cry, the more you will be able and desirous to do so.

Missy had begun to gush at a very early age. Lamartine

was her favorite bard from the period when she first could feel; and she had subsequently improved her mind by a sedulous study of novels of the great modern authors of the French language. There was not a romance of Balzac and George Sand which the indefatigable little creature had not devoured by the time she was sixteen: and, however little she sympathized with her relatives at home, she had friends, as she said, in the spirit-world, meaning the tender Indiana, the passionate and poetic Lelia, the amiable Trenmor, that high-souled convict, that angel of the galleys, the fiery Stenio, and the other numberless heroes of the French romances. She had been in love with Prince Rodolph and Prince Djalma while she was yet at school, and had settled the divorce question, and the rights of woman, with Indiana, before she had left off pinafores. The impetuous little lady played at love with these imaginary worthies, as a little while before she had played at maternity with her doll. Pretty little poetical spirits! it is curious to watch them with those playthings. To-day the blue-eyed one is the favorite, and the black-eyed one is pushed behind the drawers. To-morrow blue-eyes may take its turn of neglect and it may be an odious little wretch with a burnt nose, or torn head of hair, and no eyes at all, that takes the first place in Miss's affection, and is dandled and caressed in her arms.

As novelists are supposed to know everything, even the scerets of female hearts, which the owners themselves do not perhaps know, we may state that at eleven years of age Mademoiselle Betsi, as Miss Amory was then called, had felt tender emotions towards a young Savoyard organ-grinder at Paris, whom she persisted in believing to be a prince carried off from his parents; that at twelve an old and hideous drawing-master -(but, ah, what age or personal defects are proof against woman's love?) had agitated her young heart; and that, at thirteen, being at Madame de Carmel's boarding-school, in the Champs Elysées, which, as everybody knows, is next door to Monsieur Rogron's (Chevalier of the Legion of Honor) pension for young gentlemen, a correspondence by letter took place between the séduisante Miss Betsi and two young gentlemen of the College of Charlemagne, who were pensioners of the Chevalier Rogron.

In the above paragraph our young friend has been called by a Christian name, different to that under which we were lately presented to her. The fact is, that Miss Amory, called Missy at home, had really at the first been christened Betsy - but