ok at once, and wished the doctor good-evening without further
ceremony. As he politely opened the door for me, he reverted, without
the slightest necessity for doing so, and without a word from me to lead
to it, to the outburst of virtuous alarm which had escaped him at the
earlier part of our interview.

"'I do hope,' he said, 'that you will kindly forget and forgive my
extraordinary want of tact and perception when--in short, when I caught
the fly. I positively blush at my own stupidity in putting a literal
interpretation on a lady's little joke! Violence in My Sanitarium!'
exclaimed the doctor, with his eyes once more fixed attentively on my
face--'violence in this enlightened nineteenth century! Was there ever
anything so ridiculous? Do fasten your cloak before you go out, it is so
cold and raw! Shall I escort you? Shall I send my servant? Ah, you were
always independent! always, if I may say so, a host in yourself! May
I call to-morrow morning, and hear what you have settled with Mr.
Bashwood?'

"I said yes, and got away from him at last. In a quarter of an hour more
I was back at my lodgings, and was informed by the servant that 'the
elderly gentleman' was still waiting for me.

"I have not got the heart or the patience--I hardly know which--to waste
many words on what passed between me and Bashwood. It was so easy, so
degradingly easy, to pull the strings of the poor old puppet in any
way I pleased! I met none of the difficulties which I should have
been obliged to meet in the case of a younger man, or of a man less
infatuated with admiration for me. I left the allusions to Miss Milroy
in Armadale's letter, which had naturally puzzled him, to be explained
at a future time. I never even troubled myself to invent a plausible
reason for wishing him to meet Armadale at the terminus, and to entrap
him by a stratagem into the doctor's Sanitarium. All that I found it
necessary to do was to refer to what I had written to Mr. Bashwood, on
my arrival in London, and to what I had afterward said to him, when he
came to answer my letter personally at the hotel.

"'You know already,' I said, 'that my marriage has not been a happy
one. Draw your own conclusions from that; and don't press me to tell you
whether the news of Mr. Armadale's rescue from the sea is, or is not,
the welcome news that it ought to be to his wife!' That was enough to
put his withered old face in a glow, and to set his withered old hopes
growing again