I am far from desiring to expose either you or myself to this painful position. I want to part good friends with you; and if there may have been anything in my discourse worth carrying away, I would not willingly associate it with weariness at the last. And yet I am very loath to say good-bye. Authors are, par excellence, button-holders, and they cannot relinquish their grasp on the victim whose lapel they have caught. Now I would like to tell you of that wedding at the Swan's Nest. You 'd read it if in the “Morning Post,” but I'm afraid you'd skip it from me. I 'd like to recount the events of that breakfast, the present Sir Brook made the bride, and the charming little speech with which the Chief proposed her health. I 'd like to describe to you the uproar and joyous confusion when Tom, whose costume bore little trace of a wedding garment, fought his way through the servants into the breakfast-room.
And I 'd like to grow moral and descriptive, and a bit pathetic perhaps, over the parting between Lucy and her father; and, last of all, I 'd like to add a few words about him who gives his name to this story, and tell how he set off once more on his wanderings, no one well knowing whither bent, but how, on reaching Boulogne, he saw from the steamer's deck, as he landed, the portly figure of Lady Lendrick walking beside her beautiful daughter-in-law, Sewell bringing up the rear, with a little child holding his hand on either side,—a sweet picture, combining, to Boulogne appreciation, the united charm of fashion, beauty, and domestic felicity; and finally, how, stealing by back streets to the hotel where these people stopped, he deposited to their address a somewhat weighty packet, which made them all very happy, or at least very merry, that evening as they opened it and induced Sewell to order a bottle of Cliquot, if not, as he said, “to drink the old buck's health,” at least to wish him many returns of the same good dispositions of that morning.
If, however, you are disposed to accept the will for the deed, I need say no more. They who have deserved some share of happiness in this tale are likely to have it. They who have little merited will have to meet a world which, neither over cruel nor over generous, has a rough justice that generally gives people their deserts.
THE END.