These two soon understood each other, almost indeed from the moment when Mr. Jefferson Crawley, having run away with the young woman, wished to set aside the ceremony of marriage which Christabel, the mysterious lady, had punctiliously insisted upon. What a wedding it was! What a honeymoon! Yet not stranger than ten thousand other weddings and honeymoons. Truth stranger than fiction! If that strange little fellow on two sticks who appeared so mysteriously to Don Cleofas, would come and take you for an evening’s ramble, you would see in half an hour how far fiction falls short of the realities of life; how far the darkest pictures which those ready writers have limned in pen and ink are less appalling than the realities of sin, and wickedness, and woe, which exist in the dark places of our modern Babylon! Ask that detective officer who used to visit the late Mr. Christopher Tallant at Barton Hall; he could tell you some rare tales of the class of people to whom Mr. and Mrs. Crawley belong. But even that gentleman would be surprised if Asmodeus sat him down upon St. Paul’s, and unroofed a few hundred yards of that mass of brick, behind which the great game of life is being played out in ten thousand different ways. Before Mr. Gibbs had been married three months, he gave his wife permission to find a better home if she could. He vowed he had no desire to limit anybody’s freedom. As far as the work of the household went, he said, looking round the miserable den, he thought he should lose nothing by the departure of the lady of the house. He could easily get somebody else to come and clean his boots, and cut bread and butter for him. If the young lady thought it would advance her prospects to leave his humble roof, she might go; he should put no advertisement in the papers for her, he should employ no private detective to hunt her up: he was exceedingly obliged to her for becoming his wife, highly honoured in fact, if not more so, but he should not break his heart if she returned to the sawdust and naphtha lamps of the Temple of Magic. And so the young lady disappeared accordingly; but that wonderful account which she gave of her early life, and which Lieutenant Somerton repeated to the barrister, left out altogether those incidents to which her husband had alluded. She certainly did justice to the gambler’s tuition. Old Martin could never have taught her to be such a clever dissembler; and that melancholy clown who had on his deathbed presented her father with Momus, had certainly not wit enough to instruct her in such delicate cunning.