‘So, Mr. Jabez Duck,’ she muttered, ‘you’re too busy to call, are you?—and you haven’t a word to say for yourself. A pretty fine thing, indeed, after coming here to tea week after week, and me a-buying muffins and Sally Lungs, and delicacies no end for you, and then to be treated like this. But you’ve got hold of the wrong sort, Mr. Jabez Duck. I can tell you. I ain’t one o’ them slips o’ gals as is to be made a fool of, and played fast and loose with.’ It was, perhaps, hardly necessary for Mrs. Turvey to state that she was not a slip of a girl. No one could have brought such an accusation against her. To tell the truth, the love affairs of Jabez and Susan had not progressed lately so satisfactorily as could be wished by the lady. Up to the time of Mr. Egerton’s sudden reappearance in the land of the living, Jabez had been most assiduous. The wooing, it is true, had not been very long or very romantic—they were past the age of ‘linked sweetness long drawn out’—but it would be impossible to say that the courting had been devoid of poetry. Jabez had inundated the lady with poetry. Susan had a nice little collection of Jabez’s poems upstairs. ‘I wish he wouldn’t write such rigmaroles,’ she said one day, as she tried to understand a ‘Sonnet to my Susan,’ which Jabez sent on a sheet of Grigg and Limpet’s headed note, and which he assured her he had composed with his window open, gazing at the stars, and thinking of her. Mrs. Turvey, reading the following, might well require time to consider what it meant: SONNET TO MY SUSAN.= The stars are in the sky, Susan, And I am sitting here; But you are in my eye, Susan, Among the moonbeams clear. My heart your image holds, Susan, And will the while it beats, All through the winter colds, Susan, As well as summer heats. I think of you by morn, Susan, I think of you by night, My love, oh, do not scorn, Susan, My hopes, oh, do not blight! The bullseye of my soul, Susan, Thy dart of love has struck, And while the ages roll, Susan, I’ll be your Jabez Duck. This was only one of the ‘rigmar’oles’ in writing which Jabez had begirded the time of Grigg and Limpet, which hung heavily on his hands—too heavily to be relieved by anything but verse. Now all of these ‘rigmaroles,’ full of poetical declarations, Mrs. Turvey, being a wise woman, had treasured, and Mr. Duck was painfully aware of the fact. Things had altered considerably with the reappearance of Mr. Egerton. Susan still remained—but where was her legacy? Jabez was a poet, but there was quite enough prose in his composition to appreciate the difference between Mrs. Turvey plus five hundred pounds and Mrs. Turvey pure and simple.