only my child. Come, and let me put you to bed."

She yielded with a weary sigh. Ah, how lovely she looked in her pretty
night-dress, on her knees at the bed-side--the innocent, afflicted
creature--saying her prayers!

I am, let me own, an equally headlong woman at loving and hating. When I
had left her for the night, I could hardly have felt more tenderly
interested in her if she had been really a child of my own. You have met
with people of my sort--unless you are a very forbidding person
indeed--who have talked to you in the most confidential manner of all
their private affairs, on meeting you in a railway carriage, or sitting
next to you at a table-d'ho^te. For myself, I believe I shall go on
running up sudden friendships with strangers to my dying day. Infamous
Dubourg! If I could have got into Browndown that night, I should have
liked to have done to him what a Mexican maid of mine (at the Central
American period of my career) did to her drunken husband--who was a kind
of peddler, dealing in whips and sticks. She sewed him strongly up one
night in the sheet, while he lay snoring off his liquor in bed; and then
she took his whole stock-in-trade out of the corner of the room, and
broke it on him, to the last article on sale, until he was beaten to a
jelly from head to foot.

Not having this resource open to me, I sat myself down in my bedroom, to
consider--if the matter of Dubourg went any further--what it was my
business to do next.

I have already mentioned that Lucilla and I had idled away the whole
afternoon, woman-like, in talking of ourselves. You will best understand
what course my reflections took, if I here relate the chief particulars