Algernon signified positively that he would not, and doggedly refused to explain why.

“Then I will call on you,” said Mrs. Lovell.

He was going to say something angrily, when Mrs. Lovell checked him:  “Hush! she is singing.”

Algernon listened to the prima donna in loathing; he had so much to inquire about, and so much to relate:  such a desire to torment and be comforted!

Before he could utter a word further, the door opened, and Major Waring appeared, and he beheld Mrs. Lovell blush strangely.  Soon after, Lord Elling came in, and spoke the ordinary sentence or two concerning the day’s topic—­the horse Templemore.  Algernon quitted the box.  His ears were surcharged with sound entirely foreign to his emotions, and he strolled out of the house and off to his dingy chambers, now tenanted by himself alone, and there faced the sealed letters addressed to Edward, which had, by order, not been forwarded.  No less than six were in Dahlia’s handwriting.  He had imagination sufficient to conceive the lamentations they contained, and the reproach they were to his own subserviency in not sending them.  He looked at the postmarks.  The last one was dated two months back.

“How can she have cared a hang for Ned, if she’s ready to go and marry a yokel, for the sake of a home and respectability?” he thought, rather in scorn; and, having established this contemptuous opinion of one of the sex, he felt justified in despising all.  “Just like women!  They—­no!  Peggy Lovell isn’t.  She’s a trump card, and she’s a coquette—­can’t help being one.  It’s in the blood.  I never saw her look so confoundedly lovely as when that fellow came into the box.  One up, one down.  Ned’s away, and it’s this fellow’s turn.  Why the deuce does she always think I’m a boy? or else, she pretends to.  But I must give my mind to business.”

He drew forth the betting-book which his lively fancy had lost on the Downs.  Prompted by an afterthought, he went to the letter-box, saying,—­

“Who knows?  Wait till the day’s ended before you curse your luck.”

There was a foreign letter in it from Edward, addressed to him, and another addressed to “Mr. Blancuv,” that he tore open and read with disgusted laughter.  It was signed “N.  Sedgett.”  Algernon read it twice over, for the enjoyment of his critical detection of the vile grammar, with many “Oh! by Joves!” and a concluding, “This is a curiosity!”

It was a countryman’s letter, ill-spelt, involved, and of a character to give Algernon a fine scholarly sense of superiority altogether novel.  Everybody abused Algernon for his abuse of common Queen’s English in his epistles:  but here was a letter in comparison with which his own were doctorial, and accordingly he fell upon it with an acrimonious rapture of pedantry known to dull wits that have by extraordinary hazard pounced on a duller.

“You’re ‘willing to forgeit and forgeive,’ are you, you dog!” he exclaimed, half dancing.  “You’d forge anything, you rascal, if you could disguise your hand—­that, I don’t doubt.  You ’expeck the thousand pound to be paid down the day of my marriage,’ do you, you impudent ruffian! ‘acording to agremint.’  What a mercenary vagabond this is!”