sing-room and dismissed her
attendant. 'My dear sir,' she said as he entered, 'you have forgot our
vigils last night, and have hardly allowed me time to comb my hair,
although you must be sensible how it stood on end at the various wonders
which took place.'

'It is with the inside of your head that I have some business at present,
Julia; I will return the outside to the care of your Mrs. Mincing in a
few minutes.'

'Lord, papa,' replied Miss Mannering, 'think how entangled all my ideas
are, and you to propose to comb them out in a few minutes! If Mincing
were to do so in her department she would tear half the hair out of my
head.'

'Well then, tell me,' said the Colonel, 'where the entanglement lies,
which I will try to extricate with due gentleness?'

'O, everywhere,' said the young lady; 'the whole is a wild dream.'

'Well then, I will try to unriddle it.' He gave a brief sketch of the
fate and prospects of Bertram, to which Julia listened with an interest
which she in vain endeavoured to disguise. 'Well,' concluded her father,
'are your ideas on the subject more luminous?'

'More confused than ever, my dear sir,' said Julia. 'Here is this young
man come from India, after he had been supposed dead, like Aboulfouaris
the great voyager to his sister Canzade and his provident brother Hour. I
am wrong in the story, I believe--Canzade was his wife; but Lucy may
represent the one and the Dominie the other. And then this lively
crack-brained Scotch lawyer appears like a pantomime at the end of a
tragedy. And then how delightful it will be if Lucy gets back her
fortune.'

'Now I think,' said the Colonel, 'that the most mysterious part of the
business is, that Miss Julia Mannering, who must have known her father's
anxiety about the fate of this young man Brown, or Bertram, as we must
now call him, should have met him when Hazlewood's accident took place,
and never once mentioned to her father a word of the matter, but suffered
the search to proceed against this young gentleman as a suspicious
character and assassin.'

Julia, much of whose courage had been hastily assumed to meet the
interview with her father, was now unable to rally herself; she hung down
her head in silence, after in vain attempting to utter a denial that she
recollected Brown when she met him.

'No answer! Well, Julia,' continued her father, gravely but kindly,
'allow me to ask you, Is this the only time you have seen Brown since his
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