years, so far as a promise is concerned, yet remember that a promise
and a fancy are two different things. We may do what's right for
the fear o' God, and not love Him either. Marmion, let the marriage
bells be rung early--a maiden's heart is a ticklish thing. . . .

But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who
had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it,
and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with
laughter. At first every one stared aghast ("stared aghast!"--how
is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then
haw-hawed till he couldn't lift his champagne, the rest of us
followed in a double-quick. And the bookmaker simply sat calm and
earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than
gently smile. "See here," he said ever so candidly of Clovelly's
best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified
figure in the book--"I liked the way you drew that muff. He was
such an awful outsider, wasn't he? All talk, and hypocrite down to
his heels. And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her
food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went 'slumming'
and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!"--
[This was Clovelly's heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said
himself, "with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness,
and a sweet creation altogether."] "I said, that's poetic justice,
that's the refinement of retribution. Any other yarn-spinner would
have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or
a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture.
He said, 'Go to blazes,' and he fixed up that marriage--and there
you are! Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!"

Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing