Well, Mr. Frank was a stanch friend of mine, and ready to recommend me whenever he got the chance.  I had contrived to get him a little timely help—­for a consideration, of course—­in borrowing money at a fair rate of interest; in fact, I had saved him from the Jews.  The money was borrowed while Mr. Frank was at college.  He came back from college, and stopped at home a little while, and then there got spread about all our neighborhood a report that he had fallen in love, as the saying is, with his young sister’s governess, and that his mind was made up to marry her.  What! you’re at it again, Mr. Artist!  You want to know her name, don’t you?  What do you think of Smith?

Speaking as a lawyer, I consider report, in a general way, to be a fool and a liar.  But in this case report turned out to be something very different.  Mr. Frank told me he was really in love, and said upon his honor (an absurd expression which young chaps of his age are always using) he was determined to marry Smith, the governess—­the sweet, darling girl, as he called her; but I’m not sentimental, and I call her Smith, the governess.  Well, Mr. Frank’s father, being as proud as Lucifer, said “No,” as to marrying the governess, when Mr. Frank wanted him to say “Yes.”  He was a man of business, was old Gatliffe, and he took the proper business course.  He sent the governess away with a first-rate character and a spanking present, and then he, looked about him to get something for Mr. Frank to do.  While he was looking about, Mr. Frank bolted to London after the governess, who had nobody alive belonging to her to go to but an aunt—­her father’s sister.  The aunt refuses to let Mr. Frank in without the squire’s permission.  Mr. Frank writes to his father, and says he will marry the girl as soon as he is of age, or shoot himself.  Up to town comes the squire and his wife and his daughter, and a lot of sentimentality, not in the slightest degree material to the present statement, takes places among them; and the upshot of it is that old Gatliffe is forced into withdrawing the word No, and substituting the word Yes.

I don’t believe he would ever have done it, though, but for one lucky peculiarity in the case.  The governess’s father was a man of good family—­pretty nigh as good as Gatliffe’s own.  He had been in the army; had sold out; set up as a wine-merchant—­failed—­died; ditto his wife, as to the dying part of it.  No relation, in fact, left for the squire to make inquiries about but the father’s sister—­who had behaved, as old Gatliffe said, like a thorough-bred gentlewoman in shutting the door against Mr. Frank in the first instance.  So, to cut the matter short, things were at last made up pleasant enough.  The time was fixed for the wedding, and an announcement about it—­Marriage in High Life and all that—­put into the county paper.  There was a regular biography, besides, of the governess’s father, so as to stop people from talking—­a great flourish about his pedigree, and a long account of his services in the army; but not a word, mind ye, of his having turned wine-merchant afterward.  Oh, no—­not a word about that!