The cares of married life have settled down heavily upon his young head before we leave him.

He not only marries, but loses his wife, and is left a melancholy widower with his son.

Esmond and Beatrix certainly reach no such elysium as that of which we are speaking.

But Pen, who surely deserved a Nemesis, though perhaps not one so black as that demanded by George Osborne's delinquencies, is treated as though he had been passed through the fire, and had come out,--if not pure gold, still gold good enough for goldsmiths.

"And what sort of a husband will this Pendennis be ?" This is the question asked by the author himself at the end of the novel; feeling, no doubt, some hesitation as to the justice of what he had just done.