"Giving himself airs on account of his success," said genial Mr. Bowie, the art-critic. "I wouldn't wait any longer for him, Stompff." "I won't," said Stompff. "Dinner!" The dinner was excellent, the wine good and plentiful, the guests well assorted, and the conversation as racy and salted as it usually is when a hecatomb of absent friends is duly slaughtered by the company. Each man said the direst things he could about his own personal enemies; and there were but very few cases in which the rest of the _convives_ did not join in chorus. It was during a pause in this kind of conversation--much later in the evening, when the windows had been thrown open, and most of the men were smoking in the balcony--that little Tommy Smalt, who had done full justice to the claret, took his cigar from his mouth, leaned lazily back, and looking up at the moonlit sky, felt in such a happy state of repletion and tobacco as to be momentarily charitable--the which feeling induced him to say: "I wish Ludlow had been with us!" "His own fault that he's not," said Mr. Stompff; "his own fault entirely. However, he's missed a pleasant evening. I rather think we've had the pull of him." Had Geoff missed a pleasant evening? He thought otherwise. He thought he had, never had such an evening in his life; for the same cold steel-blue rays of the early spring moon which fell upon the topers in the Blackwall balcony came gleaming in through Mr. Flexor's first-floor window, lighting up a pallid face set in a frame of dead-gold hair and pillowed on Geoffrey Ludlow's breast. CHAPTER XIV. THOSE TWAIN ONE FLESH. So it was a settled thing between Margaret Dacre and Geoffrey Ludlow. She had acceded to his earnest demand--demand thrice repeated--after due consideration and delay, and she was to become his wife forthwith. Indeed, their colloquy on that delicious moonlight evening would have been brought to a conclusion much sooner than it was, had not Geoff stalwartly declared and manfully held to his determination, spite of every protest, not to go until they had settled upon a day on which to be married. He did not see the use of waiting, he said; it would get buzzed about by the Flexors; and all sorts of impertinent remarks and congratulations would be made, which they could very well do without. Of course, as regarded herself, Margaret would want a--what do you call it?--outfit, _trousseau_, that was the word. But it appeared to him that all he had to do was to give her the money, And all she had to do was to go out and get the things she wanted, and that need not take any time, or hinder them from naming a day--well, let us say in next week. He himself had certain little arrangements to make; but he could very well get through them all in that time. And what did Margaret say?