“I heartily congratulate you on your choice of a wife; and I hope you will both be spared for many long years to be a comfort to each other.” Boh! boh! Conny burst into tears, ran up to me, clung to my arm, and upturning her sweet, deceitful eyes, now with their rich blue deepened by tears, cried, “Oh, Charlie, I knew you would forgive me! I always felt you would! Do ask mamma to love me again, and to be friends with Theodore.” “She will need no asking,” I answered, feeling perfectly patriarchal, and thinking what a mean figure I was involuntarily making Mr. Theodore cut. “Her heart is the kindest that ever beat in a woman’s bosom; and I shall be greatly mistaken if, after you have allowed her a little breathing time, to recover the shock, she does not clasp her only, her beloved child again to her breast, and forgive the man whose only sin has been that he has loved her daughter too well.” Having uttered which surprising piece of eloquence, I was confounded by my uncle bursting into tears. “Don’t mind me,” he sobbed, through his fingers; “I entreat--I implore that none of you will look at me.” “Oh, my dear husband!” shrieked his wife, rushing up to him, and casting her arms around his neck. “Oh, papa, papa!” cried Conny, likewise running up to him, casting herself on her knees and fondling his legs. To complete the tableau nothing was wanting but for Mr. Curling and me to lock each other’s figure in a passionate embrace. But I would rather have been poisoned. “There, there, there!” mumbled my poor uncle, releasing himself from his wife and child by struggling out of his chair. “I must apologise for my weakness. God knows how many years it is since I shed a tear. Charlie, my boy, pray be seated. Curling, raise your wife.” However, Conny saved her husband this trouble by getting up herself. My aunt resumed her chair; Curling took the music-stool, and my uncle and I shared the sofa. The silence that followed was exquisitely embarrassing. I gasped and gulped about in my mind for something to say, but was as absolutely vacant of ideas as a foolish and nervous “best man,” who rises to propose “the bridesmaids,” and can do nothing for a long and awful pause but fix a fishy eye on the person immediately opposite. Conny never looked at me. Her swollen blue eyes were glued to the carpet. As for my aunt, her face was as stony and hard as anything ever found by Mr. Layard at Nineveh. At last, feeling the silence too oppressive for my nerves to endure without something cracking, I asked my uncle, in a voice that appeared to me fearfully loud, “How is London looking?” “Very much as usual,” he replied.