Charley had sworn to love her, and she had sworn to love Charley; and to give her her due, she had kept her word to him.

Though her life rendered necessary a sort of daily or rather nightly flirtation with various male comers--as indeed, for the matter of that, did also the life of Miss Clementina Golightly--yet she had in her way been true to her lover.

She had been true to him, and Charley did not doubt her, and in a sort of low way respected her; though it was but a dissipated and debauched respect.

There had even been talk between them of marriage, and who can say what in his softer moments, when his brain had been too weak or the toddy too strong, Charley may not have promised?
And there was yet another objection to Miss Golightly; one even more difficult of mention, one on which Charley felt himself more absolutely constrained to silence than even either of the other two.

He was sufficiently disinclined to speak to his cousin Alaric as to the merits either of Mr.Jabesh M'Ruen or of Miss Geraghty, but he could have been eloquent on either rather than whisper a word as to the third person who stood between him and the L20,000.
The school in which Charley now lived, that of the infernal navvies, had taught him to laugh at romance; but it had not been so successful in quelling the early feelings of his youth, in drying up the fountains of poetry within him, as had been the case with his cousin, in that other school in which he had been a scholar.