bbins, to wit, or his son! No, thank you, Mrs. Busk, not
yet. Surely we are not quite reduced to such a hopeless pass as that. My
father knew what the police were worth, and so does Betsy, and so does
Major Hockin. 'Pompous noodles,' the Major calls them, who lay hold of
every thing by the wrong end."

"Then if he can lay hold of the right end, miss, what better could you
do than consult him?"

I had been thinking of this already, and pride alone debarred me. That
gentleman's active nature drove him to interfere with other people's
business, even though he had never heard of them; and yet through some
strange reasoning of his own, or blind adoption of public unreason, he
had made me dislike, or at any rate not like, him, until he began to
show signs at last of changing his opinion. And now the question was,
had he done that enough for me, without loss of self-respect, to open my
heart to him, and seek counsel?

In settling that point the necessity of the case overrode, perhaps, some
scruples; in sooth, I had nobody else to go to. What could I do with
Lord Castlewood? Nothing; all his desire was to do exactly what my
father would have done: and my father had never done any thing more than
rove and roam his life out. To my mind this was dreadful now, when every
new thing rising round me more and more clearly to my mind established
what I never had doubted--his innocence. Again, what good could I do by
seeking Betsy's opinion about it, or that of Mrs. Price, or Stixon, or
any other person I could think of? None whatever--and perhaps much harm.
Taking all in all, as things turn up, I believed myself to be almost
equal to the cleverest of those three in sense, and in courage not
inferior. Moreover, a sort of pride--perhaps very small, but not
contemptible--put me against throwing my affairs so much into the hands
of servants.

For this idea Uncle Sam, no doubt the most liberal of men, would perhaps
condemn me. But still I was not of the grand New World, whose pedigrees
are arithmetic (at least with many of its items, though the true Uncle
Sam was the last for that); neither could I come up to the largeness of
universal brotherhood. That was not to be expected of a female; and few
things make a man more angry than for his wife to aspire to it. No such
ideas had ever troubled me; I had more important things to think of,
or, at any rate, something to be better carried out. And of all these
desultory thoughts it came that I