" she whispered.
I told her Zillah had left the room. She laid her charming head on my
shoulder, and sighed hysterically. "I can't help thinking of him," she
burst out. "I am miserable for the first time in my life--no! I am happy
for the first time in my life. Oh, what must you think of me! I don't
know what I am talking about. Why did you encourage him to speak to us? I
might never have heard his voice but for you." She lifted her head again
with a little shiver, and composed herself. One of her hands wandered
here and there over the keys of the piano, playing softly. "His charming
voice!" she whispered dreamily while she played. "Oh, his charming
voice!" She paused again. Her hand dropped from the piano, and took mine.
"Is this love?" she said, half to herself, half to me.

My duty as a respectable woman lay clearly before me--my duty was to tell
her a lie.

"It is nothing, my dear, but too much excitement and too much fatigue," I
said. "To-morrow you shall be my young lady again. To-night you must be
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'hote. 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 m