son's secrets. But she kept these things in her heart (if we may so
speak), and did not speak of them. Besides, she had made up her mind that
he was to marry little Laura, who would be eighteen when Pen was
six-and-twenty: and had finished his college career, and had made his
grand tour, and was settled either in London, astonishing all the
metropolis by his learning and eloquence at the bar, or better still in a
sweet country parsonage surrounded with hollyhocks and roses, close to a
delightful romantic ivy-covered church, from the pulpit of which Pen
would utter the most beautiful sermons ever preached.

While these natural sentiments were waging war and trouble in honest
Pen's bosom, it chanced one day that he rode into Chatteris, for the
purpose of carrying to the County Chronicle a tremendous and thrilling
poem for the next week's paper; and putting up his horse according to
custom, at the stables of the George Hotel there, he fell in with an old
acquaintance. A grand black tandem, with scarlet wheels, came rattling
into the inn yard, as Pen stood there in converse with the hostler about
Rebecca; and the voice of the driver called out, "Hallo, Pendennis, is
that you?" in a loud patronising manner. Pen had some difficulty in
recognising under the broad-brimmed hat and the vast great-coats and
neckcloths, with which the new-comer was habited, the person and figure
of his quondam schoolfellow, Mr. Foker.

A year's absence had made no small difference in that gentleman. A youth
who had been deservedly whipped a few months previously, and who spent
his pocket-money on tarts and hardbake, now appeared before Pen in one of
those costumes to which the public consent, that I take to be quite as
influential in this respect as 'Johnson's Dictionary,' has awarded the
title of "Swell.' He had a bull-dog between his legs, and in his scarlet
shawl neckcloth was a pin representing another bull-dog in gold: he wore