While the repast was preparing, Colonel Orpington glanced over the envelopes of the letters which he had taken from the porter and laid on the table in military order before him. They are many and various: heavy official-looking letters, thin-papered missives from the Continent, and two or three delicate little notes. The Colonel selects one of these last, which is addressed in an obviously foreign hand, though bearing a London post-mark; the others are put aside; the dainty double-eyeglasses are brought from their hiding-place inside his waistcoat and adjusted across his nose, and he falls to the perusal of the little note. A difficult hand to read apparently, for the Colonel, though somewhat careful of showing any symptoms of loss of sight to the more youthful members of the club then present, by whom he has a certain suspicion he is looked upon as a fogey, has to hold it in various lights and twist it up and down before he can master its contents. When he has mastered them they do not appear to be of a particularly reassuring character; for the Colonel shakes his head, utters a short low whistle, and is stroking his chin with his hand, as though deep in thought, when the advanced guard of his breakfast makes its appearance. "'Coming back at once,'" says the Colonel to himself; "at least, so far as I can make out Clarisse's confoundedly cramped handwriting. 'Coming back at once,' and from what she can make out from Fanny's talk, not in the best of tempers either, and likely to bring matters to an end; and Clarisse thinks I must declare myself at once. Well, I don't see why not. "'Gad, it seems to me an extraordinary thing that I, who have been under fire so many times in these kind of affairs, should have been hesitating and hanging back and beating about the bush for so long with this girl! To be sure, she is quite unlike many of the others; more like a person in society, or rather, like what used to be society in my time: what goes by that name now is a very different thing. There's a sort of air of breeding about her, and a kind of _noli me tangere_ sort of thing mixed up with all her attractiveness, that makes the whole business a very different thing from the ordinary throwing the handkerchief and being happy ever after.