"Your wedding?"
"You don't mean it?"
"Who's the happy fair? When's it to be?"
John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said—
"I'm sorry to deprive you fellows of your only joke—but Miss Forster and I are to be married in September."
"You don't mean it?"
"He's got the mitten again, and it's turned his head."
"No," I said, rising, "I see it's true. Lend me a pistol some one—or a first-class fare to the other end of Nowhere. Charrington has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it mesmerism, or a love-potion, Jack?"
"Neither, sir, but a gift you'll never have—perseverance—and the best luck a man ever had in this world."
There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further.