he bridge, and went on quicker and quicker
toward the low ground in the park, where the trees are thickest.
I followed her over the open space with perfect impunity in the
preoccupied state she was in; and, when she began to slacken her pace
among the trees, I was among the trees too, and was not afraid of her
seeing me.

"Before long, there was a crackling and trampling of heavy feet coming
up toward us through the under-wood in a deep dip of the ground. I knew
that step as well as she knew it. 'Here I am,' she said, in a faint
little voice. I kept behind the trees a few yards off, in some doubt
on which side Armadale would come out of the under-wood to join her. He
came out up the side of the dell, opposite to the tree behind which I
was standing. They sat down together on the bank. I sat down behind the
tree, and looked at them through the under-wood, and heard without the
slightest difficulty every word that they said.

"The talk began by his noticing that she looked out of spirits, and
asking if anything had gone wrong at the cottage. The artful little minx
lost no time in making the necessary impression on him; she began
to cry. He took her hand, of course, and tried, in his brutishly
straightforward way, to comfort her. No; she was not to be comforted. A
miserable prospect was before her; she had not slept the whole night
for thinking of it. Her father had called her into his room the previous
evening, had spoken about the state of her education, and had told her
in so many words that she was to go to school. The place had been found,
and the terms had been settled; and as soon as her clothes could be got
ready, miss was to go.

"'While that hateful Miss Gwilt was in the house,' says this model young
person, 'I would have gone to school willingly--I wanted to go. But it's
all different now; I don't think of it in the same way; I feel too old
for school. I'm quite heart-broken, Mr. Armadale.' There she stopped
as if she had meant to say more, and gave him a look which finished
the sentence plainly: 'I'm quite heart-broken, Mr. Armadale, now we are
friendly again, at going away from you!' For downright brazen impudence,
which a grown woman would be ashamed of, give me the young girls whose
'modesty' is so pertinaciously insisted on by the nauseous domestic
sentimentalists of the present day!

"Even Armadale, booby as he is, understood her. After bewildering
himself in a labyrinth of words that led nowhere, he t