’I was telling my wife yesterday your story of the lady contrabandist:  I don’t think she has done laughing since,’ Mr. Calling said.

Fenellan fluted:  ‘Ah?’ He had scent, in the eulogy of a story grown flat as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way of men, a step or two behind the man of the world.  He expressed profound regret at not having heard the silvery ring of the lady’s laughter.

Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his wife.  ‘Perhaps you will some day honour us?’

‘You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.’

‘Now, if I might name the day?’

’You lump the gold and make it current coin;—­says the blushing bride, who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel, her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, named the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the complimentary tyrant he was.’

‘To-morrow, then!’ said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm, through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of friends at short notice.  He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow.

‘With happiness,’ Fenellan responded.

Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.

’To-morrow, half-past seven:  as for company to meet you, we will do what we can.  You go Westward?’

‘To bed with the sun,’ said the reveller.

‘Perhaps by Covent Garden?  I must give orders there.’

’Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter!  Ah, dear me!  Is there anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life?’

‘I was married at four and twenty,’ said Carling, as one taking up the expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, but weighty and necessary:  ’my wife was in her twentieth year:  we have five children; two sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby.  So we are grandfather and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may say for both of us.’

’Think of it!  Good luck and sagacity joined hands overhead on the day you proposed to the lady:  and I’d say, that all the credit is with her, but that it would seem to be at the expense of her sex.’

‘She would be the last to wish it, I assure you.’

’True of all good women!  You encourage me, touching a matter of deep interest, not unknown to you.  The lady’s warm heart will be with us.  Probably she sees Mrs. Burman?’

‘Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one.’

A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferentially accepted by Fenellan.

’Pardon.  She flies her flag, with her captain wanting; and she has, queerly, the right.  So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one, might be treated, it struck us, conversationally, as a respectable harbour-hulk, with more history than top-honours.  But she has the indubitable legal right to fly them—­to proclaim it; for it means little else.’