As Tilly stared about her at the dolls and toys, they stared at her and at the company. The venerable old gentlemen at the street doors (who were all in full action) showed especial interest in the party, pausing occasionally before leaping, as if they were listening to the conversation, and then plunging wildly over and over, a great many times, without halting for breath—as in a frantic state of delight with the whole proceedings. Certainly, if these old gentlemen were inclined to have a fiendish joy in the contemplation of Tackleton’s discomfiture, they had good reason to be satisfied. Tackleton couldn’t get on at all; and the more cheerful his intended bride became in Dot’s society, the less he liked it, though he had brought them together for that purpose. For he was a regular dog in the manger, was Tackleton; and when they laughed and he couldn’t, he took it into his head, immediately, that they must be laughing at him. ‘Ah, May!’ said Dot. ‘Dear dear, what changes! To talk of those merry school-days makes one young again.’ ‘Why, you an’t particularly old, at any time; are you?’ said Tackleton. ‘Look at my sober plodding husband there,’ returned Dot. ‘He adds twenty years to my age at least. Don’t you, John?’ ‘Forty,’ John replied. ‘How many _you_’ll add to May’s, I am sure I don’t know,’ said Dot, laughing. ‘But she can’t be much less than a hundred years of age on her next birthday.’ ‘Ha ha!’ laughed Tackleton. Hollow as a drum, that laugh though. And he looked as if he could have twisted Dot’s neck, comfortably. ‘Dear dear!’ said Dot. ‘Only to remember how we used to talk, at school, about the husbands we would choose. I don’t know how young, and how handsome, and how gay, and how lively, mine was not to be! And as to May’s!—Ah dear! I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, when I think what silly girls we were.’ May seemed to know which to do; for the colour flushed into her face, and tears stood in her eyes. ‘Even the very persons themselves—real live young men—were fixed on sometimes,’ said Dot. ‘We little thought how things would come about. I never fixed on John I’m sure; I never so much as thought of him. And if I had told you, you were ever to be married to Mr. Tackleton, why you’d have slapped me. Wouldn’t you, May?’ Though May didn’t say yes, she certainly didn’t say no, or express no, by any means. Tackleton laughed—quite shouted, he laughed so loud. John Peerybingle laughed too, in his ordinary good-natured and contented manner; but his was a mere whisper of a laugh, to Tackleton’s. ‘You couldn’t help yourselves, for all that. You couldn’t resist us, you see,’ said Tackleton. ‘Here we are! Here we are!’ ‘Where are your gay young bridegrooms now!’