"It shall be when you will, love. I care nothing for the world, nothing for any one in this world or beyond it, except you. And you are looking so ill! I want to be your wife, that I may have the right to take care of you." "A poor prospect for youth and beauty and wit and fashion, my dearest," he said, smiling down at her upturned face with love unutterable in his own. "You have had to bear with an old husband, and now can you put up with an ailing one? I think I am more infirm than Mr. Topsparkle, in spite of his threescore and ten. But indeed, love, I mean to reform--to forswear sack and live cleanly; or, in other words, to take good care of my life now it is worth keeping. I want to be sure of long years, love, now I am sure of you. I feel new life in my veins as I stand here with those sweet eyes looking up at me, full of the promise of bliss. Yes, dear love, I will defy augury. Why should I not be happy?" Why not, indeed? He asked himself the same question on this Christmas Eve, in the winter gloaming, in front of the great hall fire which roared so lustily in the wide chimney, and sent such a coruscation of sparks dancing merrily up to the cold north wind, that it was hard to be gloomy face to face with such a companion: hard to be gloomy when she whom he loved was coming to be his Christmas guest, to stay with him till the turn of the year; then back to the haunted house in Soho for but one night of lonely widowhood; and on the next morning they two were to meet quietly, unknown and unnoticed, at St. Anne's Church, there to be made one for ever. She was coming. Herrick and his young wife were there to receive her. She was to bring her own little retinue: Lady Polwhele, and the Asterleys, and a certain Mrs. Lydia Vansittart, a young lady of good birth, small fortune, and easy manners, whom Lady Judith had taken up of late as companion and confidante--a woman of fashion must always have some one of this kind, an unofficial maid of honour, who retires at intervals, like the real article, to make way for a successor, and, unlike the official damsel, is not always certain of returning to her post. Lavendale was not an admirer of Lady Polwhele, nor of her led captain and his buxom wife, and indeed wondered that his mistress should keep such company; yet at the least hint from her he had hastened to invite them, and was ready to pay them all the honours of a sumptuous hospitality. Mrs. Vansittart he thought a harmless young person, but brazen, after the manner of damsels at the Court end of town. The author of _Gulliver_ had talked of her openly as an insolent drab, but "insolent drab" with the Dean of St. Patrick's was sometimes a term of endearment. Lord Bolingbroke had promised to spend a day or two at the Manor before the turn of the year, to inspect the home-farm, and compare its old-fashioned neglect with his own new-fangled improvements at Dawley.