But
I don't want to part nothing but friends."
"Good-bye," returned Peckaby, in a hearty tone, as he turned himself
round on his bed. "Give my love to the saints."
To find him in this accommodating humour was more than she had bargained
for. A doubt had crossed her sometimes, whether, when the white donkey
did come, there might not arise a battle with Peckaby, ere she should
get off. This apparently civil feeling on his part awoke a more social
one on hers; and a qualm of conscience darted across her, suggesting
that she might have made him a better wife had she been so disposed. "He
might have shook hands with me," was her parting thought, as she
unlocked the street door.
The donkey was waiting outside with all the patience for which donkeys
are renowned. It had been drawn up under a sheltering ledge at a door or
two's distance, to be out of the rain. Its two conductors were muffled
up, as befitted the inclemency of the night, something like their voices
appeared to have been. Mrs. Peckaby was not in her sober senses
sufficiently to ask whether they were brothers from the New Jerusalem,
or whether the style of costume they favoured might be the prevailing
mode in that fashionable city; if so, it was decidedly more useful than
elegant, consisting apparently of hop sacks, doubled over the head and
over the back.
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