with Nugent on the fifth.

All this time but one small morsel of news rewarded our inquiries after
Oscar--and even that small morsel seemed to me to be unworthy of belief.

It was said that he had been seen at a military hospital--the hospital of
Alessandria, in Piedmont, I think--acting, under the surgeons, as
attendant on the badly-wounded men who had survived the famous campaign
of France and Italy against Austria. (Bear in mind, if you please, that I
am writing of the year eighteen hundred and fifty-nine, and that the
peace of Villafranca was only signed in the July of that year.)
Occupation as hospital-man-nurse was, to my mind, occupation so utterly
at variance with Oscar's temperament and character, that I persisted in
considering the intelligence thus received of him to be on the face of it
false.

On the seventeenth of the month, I had got my passport regulated, and had
packed up the greater part of my baggage in anticipation of my journey
back to England on the next day.

Carefully as I had tried to accustom his mind to the idea, my poor father
remained so immovably reluctant to let me leave him, that I was obliged
to consent to a sort of compromise. I promised, when the business which
took me to England was settled, to return again to Marseilles, and to
travel back with him to his home in Paris, as soon as he was fit to be
moved. On this condition, I gained permission to go. Poor as I was, I
infinitely preferred charging my slender purse with the expense of the
double journey, to remaining any longer in ignorance of what was going on
at Ramsgate--or at Dimchurch, as the case might be. Now that my mind was
free from anxiety about my father, I don't know which tormented me
most--my eagerness to set myself right with my sister-friend, or my vague
dread of the mischief which Nugent might have done while my back was
turned. Over, and over again I asked myself, whether Miss Batchford had,
or had not, shown my letter to Lucilla. Over and over again, I wondered
whether it had been my happy privilege to reveal Nugent under his true
aspect, and to preserve Lucilla for Oscar after all.

Towards the afternoon, on the seventeenth, I went out alone to get a
breath of fresh air, and a look at the shop-windows. I don't care who or
what she may be--high or low; handsome or ugly; young or old--it always
relieves a woman's mind to look at the shop-windows.

I had not been five minutes out, before I met my princely superint