 Why shouldn't she
love him? Whom else would I have her love? What can she be to me but the dearest
and the fairest and the best of women?«
    So, leaving the women similarly engaged within, the two gentlemen walked
away, each occupied with his own thoughts, and silent for a considerable space.
»I must set this matter right,« thought honest George, »as she loves him still;
I must set his mother's mind right about the other woman.« And with this
charitable thought, the good fellow began to tell more at large what Bows had
said to him regarding Miss Bolton's behaviour and fickleness, and he described
how the girl was no better than a little light-minded flirt; and, perhaps, he
exaggerated the good-humour and contentedness which he had himself, as he
thought, witnessed in her behaviour in the scene with Mr. Huxter.
    Now, all Bows's statements had been coloured by an insane jealousy and rage
on that old man's part; and instead of allaying Pen's renascent desire to see
his little conquest again, Warrington's accounts inflamed and angered Pendennis,
and made him more anxious than before to set himself right, as he persisted in
phrasing it, with Fanny. They arrived at the church door presently; but scarce
one word of the service, and not a syllable of Mr. Shamble's sermon, did either
of them comprehend, probably - so much was each engaged with his own private
speculations. The Major came up to them after the service, with his well-brushed
hat and wig, and his jauntiest, most cheerful air. He complimented them upon
being seen at church; again he said that every comme-il-faut person made a point
of attending the English service abroad; and he walked back with the young men,
prattling to them in garrulous good-humour, and making bows to his acquaintances
as they passed, and thinking innocently that Pen and George were both highly
delighted by his anecdotes, which they suffered to run on in a scornful and
silent acquiescence.
    At the time of Mr. Shamble's sermon (an erratic Anglican divine, hired for
the season at places of English resort, and addicted to debts, drinking, and
even to roulette, it was said), Pen, chafing under the persecution which his
womankind inflicted upon him, had been meditating a great act of revolt and of
justice, as he had worked himself up to believe; and Warrington on his part had
been thinking that a crisis in his
