and proceeded to dress in a knowing suit of rough clothes, singing, “Ah, non giunge! as he slid into them.
Presently, glancing from his south window, he observed several matinal smokes rising from the chimneys of a country-house a mile away, on a slope fronting the river.
“Peter Skerrett must be back from Europe at last,” he thought. “I hope he is as fine a fellow as he was ten years ago. I hope marriage has not made him a muff, and wealth a weakling.”
Wade went down to breakfast with an heroic appetite. His “Merry Christmas” to Mrs. Purtett was followed up by a ravished kiss and the gift of a silver butter-knife. The good widow did not know which to be most charmed with. The butter-knife was genuine, shining, solid silver, with her initials, M. B. P., Martha Bilsby Purtett, given in luxuriant flourishes; but then the kiss had such a fine twang, such an exhilarating titillation! The late Perry’s kisses, from first to last, had wanted point. They were, as the Spanish proverb would put it, unsavory as unsalted eggs, for want of a moustache. The widow now perceived, with mild regret, how much she had missed when she married “a man all shaven and shorn.” Her cheek, still fair, though forty, flushed with novel delight, and she appreciated her lodger more than ever.
Wade’s salutation to Belle Purtett was more distant. There must be a little friendly reserve between a handsome young man and a pretty young
