the narrow
passage leading from the Old to the New Square. That fact will I
trust be remembered, and I need hardly say that the stout lady was
Mrs. Furnival. She had heard betimes of the arrival of that letter
with the Hamworth post-mark, had felt assured that it was written by
the hands of her hated rival, and had at once prepared for action.

"I shall leave this house to-day,--immediately after breakfast," she
said to Miss Biggs, as they sat disconsolately at the table with the
urn between them.

"And I think you will be quite right, my dear," replied Miss Biggs.
"It is your bounden duty to put down such wicked iniquity as
this;--not only for your own sake, but for that of morals in general.
What in the world is there so beautiful and so lovely as a high tone
of moral sentiment?" To this somewhat transcendental question Mrs.
Furnival made no reply. That a high tone of moral sentiment as a
thing in general, for the world's use, is very good, she was no doubt
aware; but her mind at the present moment was fixed exclusively on
her own peculiar case. That Tom Furnival should be made to give up
seeing that nasty woman who lived at Hamworth, and to give up also
having letters from her,--that at present was the extent of her moral
sentiment. His wicked iniquity she could forgive with a facility
not at all gratifying to Miss Biggs, if only she could bring about
such a result as that. So she merely grunted in answer to the above
proposition.

"And will you sleep away from this?" asked Miss Biggs.

"Certainly I will. I will neither eat here, nor sleep here, nor stay
here till I know that all this is at an end. I have made up my mind
what I will do."

"Well?" asked the anxious Martha.

"Oh, never mind. I am not exactly prepared to talk about it. There
are things one can't talk about,--not to anybody. One feels as though
one would burst in mentioning it. I do, I know."

Martha Biggs could not but feel that this was hard, but she knew that
friendship is nothing if it be not long enduring. "Dearest Kitty!"
she exclaimed. "If true sympathy can be of service to you--"

"I wonder whether I could get respectable lodgings in the
neighbourhood of Red Lion Square for a week?" said Mrs. Furnival,
once more bringing the conversation back from the abstract to the
concrete.

In answer to this Miss Biggs of course offered the use of her own
bedroom and of her father's house; but her father was an old man, and
Mrs. Furnival positiv