Good-bye." And away she tripped, and he returned to his work, happier than he had been for a week past.
His happiness, truly, was only on the surface.

The old wound had been salved--as what wound cannot be ?--by woman's love and woman's wit but it was not healed.

The cause of his wrong doing, the vain, self-indulgent spirit, was there still unchastened, and he was destined, that very day, to find that he had still to bear the punishment of it.
Now the reader must understand, that though one may laugh at Elsley Vavasour, because it is more pleasant than scolding at him, yet have Philistia and Fogeydom neither right nor reason to consider him a despicable or merely ludicrous person, or to cry, "Ah, if he had been as we are!" Had he been merely ludicrous, Lucia would never have married him; and he could only have been spoken of with indignation, or left utterly out of the story, as a simply unpleasant figure, beyond the purposes of a novel, though admissible now and then into tragedy.

One cannot heartily laugh at a man if one has not a lurking love for him, as one really ought to have for Elsley.

How much value is to be attached to his mere power of imagination and fancy, and so forth, is a question; but there was in him more than mere talent: there was, in thought at least, virtue and magnanimity.
True, the best part of him, perhaps almost all the good part of him, spent itself in words, and must be looked for, not in his life, but in his books.