Dean's guests, and being a gallant man, and seeing from his place at the
mahogany the Dean's lady walking up and down the grass, with her children
sporting around her, and her pink parasol over her lovely head--the
Doctor stept out of the French windows of the dining-room into the lawn,
which skirts that apartment, and left the other white neckcloths to gird
at my lord Bishop. Then the Doctor went up and offered Mrs. Dean his arm,
and they sauntered over the ancient velvet lawn, which had been mowed and
rolled for immemorial Deans, in that easy, quiet, comfortable manner, in
which people of middle age and good temper walk after a good dinner, in a
calm golden summer evening, when the sun has but just sunk behind the
enormous cathedral-towers, and the sickle-shaped moon is growing every
instant brighter in the heavens.

Now at the end of the Dean's garden there is, as we have stated, Mrs.
Creed's house, and the windows of the first-floor room were open to admit
the pleasant summer air. A young lady of six-and-twenty, whose eyes were
perfectly wide open, and a luckless boy of eighteen, blind with love and
infatuation, were in that chamber together; in which persons, as we have
before seen them in the same place, the reader will have no difficulty in
recognising Mr. Arthur Pendennis and Miss Costigan.

The poor boy had taken the plunge. Trembling with passionate emotion, his
heart beating and throbbing fiercely, tears rushing forth in spite of
him, his voice almost choking with feeling, poor Pen had said those words
which he could withhold no more, and flung himself and his whole store of
love, and admiration, and ardour at the feet of this mature beauty. Is he
the first who has done so? Have none before or after him staked all their
treasure of life, as a savage does his land and possessions against a
draught of the fair-skins' fire-water, or a couple of bauble eyes?