Rose neither laughed nor cried, but she clung to her brother’s neck (standing on tiptoe to do it, for she was so good, every bit of her, that Nature could not afford to make a very tall woman out of such precious materials), and whispered to him, in her sweet, silvery voice, if he should not quite like this appointment, or if he ever for a moment wished to change his plan, how very happy it would make her to be allowed to go out and earn money by teaching, just for a few years, till they grew richer; and Lewis pressed her to his heart, and loved her so well for saying it, ay, and meaning it too, that he felt he would die rather than let her do it. And so two people who cared for each other more than for all the world beside, parted, having, after a three years’ separation, enjoyed each other’s society for two days. Not that there was anything remarkable in this, it being a notorious though inexplicable fact that the more we like people, the less we are certain to see of them. We have wearied our brain in the vain endeavour to find a reason for this phenomenon, and should feel greatly indebted to any philosophical individual who would write a treatise on “The perversity of remote contingencies, and the aggravating nature of things in general,” whereby some light might be thrown upon this obscure subject. We recommend the matter more particularly to the notice of the British Association of Science. And having seated Lewis on the box of a real good old-fashioned stage coach (alas! that, Dodo-like, the genus should be all but extinct, and nothing going, nowadays, but those wonderful, horrible, convenient, stupendous nuisances, railroads; rattling, with their “resonant steam-eagles,” as Mrs. Browning calls the locomotives), with Faust between his knees, apparently studying with the air of a connoisseur the “get up” of a spanking team of greys, we will leave him to prosecute his journey to London; reserving for another chapter the adventures which befell him in the modern Babylon. CHAPTER III.--IN WHICH RICHARD FRERE MENDS THE BACK OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, AND THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO CHARLEY LEICESTER. Richard Frere lived in a moderate-sized house in a street in the vicinity of Bedford Square. It was not exactly a romantic situation, neither was it aristocratic nor fashionable; but it was respectable and convenient, and therefore had Frere chosen it; for he was a practical man in the proper sense of the term--by which we do not mean that he thought James Watt greater than Shakespeare, but that he possessed that rare quality, good common sense, and regulated his conduct by it; and as in the course of this veracious history we shall hear and see a good deal of Richard Frere, it may tend to elucidate matters if we tell the reader at once who and what he was, and “in point of fact,” as Cousin Phoenix would say, all about him.