"Did you not write to Joe Thoroughbung, and tell him you had given up all thoughts of having me?"
"Joe!" he exclaimed. His very surprise did not permit him to go farther, at the moment, than this utterance of the young man's Christian name.
"Yes, Joe,—Joe Thoroughbung, my nephew, and yours that is to be. Did you not write and tell him that everything was over?"
"I never wrote to young Mr. Thoroughbung in my life. I should not have dreamed of such a correspondence on such a subject."
"Well, he says you did. Or, if you didn't write to Joe himself, you wrote to somebody."
"I may have written to somebody, certainly."
"And told them that you didn't mean to have anything farther to say to me?" That traitor Harry had now committed a sin worse that knocking a man down in the middle of the night and leaving him bleeding, speechless, and motionless; worse than telling a lie about it;—worse even than declining to listen to sermons read by his uncle. Harry had committed such a sin that no shilling of allowance should evermore be paid to him. Even at this moment there went through Mr. Prosper's brain an idea that there might be some unmarried female in England besides Miss Puffle and Miss Thoroughbung. "Peter Prosper, why don't you answer like a man, and tell me the honest truth?" He had never before been called Peter Prosper in his whole life.
"Perhaps you had better let me make a communication by letter," he said. At that very moment the all but completed epistle was lying on the table before him, where even her eyes might reach it. In the flurry of the moment he covered it up.
"Perhaps that is the letter which has taken you so long to write?" she said.
"It is the letter."