Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/609

509 THE PICKWICK CLUB. 509

" She's a very charming and delightful creature,** quoth IMr. Robert Sawyer, in reply ; " and has only one fault that I know of, Ben. it happens unfortunately, that that single blemish is a want of taste. She don't like me."

" It's my opinion that she don't know what she does like/' said Mr. Ben Allen, contemptuously.

"Perhaps not," remarked Mr. Bob Sawyer. " But it's my opinion that she does know what she doesn't like, and that's of even more importance."

'' I wish," said Mr. Ben Allen, setting his teeth together, and speaking more like a savage warrior who fed upon raw wolf's flesh which he carved with his fingers, than a peaceable young gentleman who eat minced veal with a knife and fork — " I wish I knew whether any rascal really has been tampering with her, and attempting to engage her affections. I think I should assassinate him, Bob."

stopping in the course of a long draught of beer, and looking malig- nantly out of the porter pot. " If that didn't do his business, I'd extract it afterwards, and kill him that way."
 * I'd put a bullet in him if I found him out," said Mr. Sawyer,

Mr. Benjamin Allen gazed abstractedly on his friend for some minutes in silence, and then said —

" You have never proposed to her point-blank, Bob ? "

" No. Because I saw it would be of no use,'' replied Mr. Robert Sawyer.

Ben, with desperate calmness. *^ She shall have you, or I'll know the reason why — I'll exert my authority."
 * ' You shall do it before you are twenty-four hours older," retorted

" Well," said IMr. Bob Sawyer, '' We shall see."

" We shall see, my friend," replied Mr. Ben Allen, fiercely. He paused for a few seconds, and added in a voice broken by emotion, " You have loved her from a child, my friend — you loved her when we were boys at school together, and even then she was wayward, and slighted your young feelings. Do you recollect, with all the eagerness of a child's love, one day pressing upon her acceptance two small carraway-seed biscuits and one sweet apple, neatly folded into a circular parcel with the leaf of a copy-book ? "


 * ' I do," replied Bob Sawyer.

" She slighted that, I think ? " said Ben Allen.

" She did," rejoined Bob. " She said I had kept the parcel so long in the pockets of my corduroys, that the apple was unpleasantly warm."

" I remember," said Mr. Allen, gloomily. " Upon which we ate it ourselves, in alternate bites."

Bob Sawyer intimated his' recollection of the circumstance last alluded to, by a melancholy frown ; and the two friends remained for some time absorbed, each in his own meditations.

While these observations were being exchanged between Mr. Bob Sawyer and Mr. Benjamin Allen, and while the boy in the grey livery, marvelling at the unwonted prolongation of the dinner, cast an anxious look from time to time towards the glass door, distracted by inward misgivings regarding the amount of minced veal which would be ulti-