Mr Toots would then turn round as if to go away; but the man knew him by this time, and knew he wouldn’t.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Mr Toots would say, as if a thought had suddenly descended on him. “Is the young woman at home?”
The man would rather think she was, but wouldn’t quite know. Then he would ring a bell that rang upstairs, and would look up the staircase, and would say, yes, she was at home, and was coming down. Then Miss Nipper would appear, and the man would retire.
“Oh! How de do?” Mr Toots would say, with a chuckle and a blush.
Susan would thank him, and say she was very well.
“How’s Diogenes going on?” would be Mr Toots’s second interrogation.
Very well indeed. Miss Florence was fonder and fonder of him every day. Mr Toots was sure to hail this with a burst of chuckles, like the opening of a bottle of some effervescent beverage.
“Miss Florence is quite well, Sir,” Susan would add.
“Oh, it’s of no consequence, thank’ee,” was the invariable reply of Mr Toots; and when he had said so, he always went away very fast.
Now it is certain that Mr Toots had a filmy something in his mind, which led him to conclude that if he could aspire successfully in the fulness of time, to the hand of Florence, he would be fortunate and blest. It is certain that Mr Toots, by some remote and roundabout road, had got to that point, and that there he made a stand. His heart was wounded; he was touched; he was in love. He had made a desperate attempt, one night, and had sat up all night for the purpose, to write an acrostic on Florence, which affected him to tears in the conception. But he never proceeded in the execution further than the words “For when I gaze,”—the flow of imagination in which he had previously written down the initial letters of the other seven lines, deserting him at that point.