Pen went off quickly to his boarding-house to do as his uncle bade him; and the Doctor, now left alone in the schoolroom, came out to shake hands with his old schoolfellow. You would not have thought it was the same man. As Cinderella at a particular hour became, from a blazing and magnificent Princess, quite an ordinary little maid in a grey petticoat, so, as the clock struck one, all the thundering majesty and awful wrath of the schoolmaster disappeared. 

 “There is nothing serious, I hope,” said the Doctor. “It is a pity to take the boy away unless there is. He is a very good boy, rather idle and unenergetic, but he is a very honest gentlemanlike little fellow, though I can’t get him to construe as I wish. Won’t you come in and have some luncheon? My wife will be very happy to see you.” 

 But Major Pendennis declined the luncheon. He said his brother was very ill, had had a fit the day before, and it was a great question if they should see him alive. 

 “There’s no other son, is there?” said the Doctor. The Major answered “No.” 

 “And there’s a good eh—a good eh—property I believe?” asked the other in an off-hand way. 

 “H’m—so so,” said the Major. Whereupon this colloquy came to an end. And Arthur Pendennis got into the postchaise with his uncle never to come back to school any more. 

 As the chaise drove through Clavering, the hostler standing whistling under the archway of the Clavering Arms, winked the postilion ominously, as much as to say all was over. The gardener’s wife came and opened the lodge-gates, and let the travellers through with a silent shake of the head. All the blinds were down at Fairoaks—the face of the old footman was as blank when he let them in. Arthur’s face was white too, with terror more than with grief. Whatever of warmth and love the deceased man might have had, and he adored his wife and loved and admired his son with all his heart, he had shut them up within himself; nor had the boy been ever able to penetrate that frigid outward barrier. But Arthur had been his father’s pride and glory through life, and his name the last which John Pendennis had tried to articulate whilst he lay with his wife’s hand clasping his own cold and clammy palm, as the flickering spirit went out into the darkness of death, and life and the world passed away from him. 

 The little girl, whose face had peered for a moment under the blinds as the chaise came up, opened the door from the stairs into the hall, 

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