altercation that might have cost me my life; how I still
treasure up the few minutes I passed beside you as the Elysian dream of
all my life--"

"I am certain, sir," broke she in while I spoke, I repeat, I know not
what,--"I am certain, sir, that you never came here to mention all this
to his Excellency."

There was a severe gravity in the way that she said these words that
recalled me to myself, but not to any consciousness of what I had been
saying; and so, in my utter discomfiture, I blundered out something
about the lost despatches and the cause of my coming.

"If you 'll wait a moment here," said she, opening a door into a neatly
furnished room, "his Excellency shall hear of your wish to see him." And
before I could answer, she was gone.

I was now alone, but in what wild perplexity and anxiety! How came
she here? What could be the meaning of her presence in this place? The
Minister was an unmarried man, so much my host had told me. How then
reconcile this fact with the presence of one who had left England but
a few days ago, as some said, to be a governess or a companion? Oh, the
agony of my doubts, the terrible agony of my dire misgivings! What
a world of iniquity do we live in, what vice and corruption are ever
around us! It was but a year or two ago, I remember, that the "Times"
newspaper had exposed the nefarious schemes of a wretch who had
deliberately invented a plan to entrap those most unprotected of all
females. The adventures of this villain had become part of the police
literature of Europe. Young and attractive creatures, induced to come
abroad by promises of the most seductive kind, had been robbed by this
man of all they possessed, and deserted here and there throughout
the Continent. I was so horror-stricken by the terrors my mind had so
suddenly conjured up, that I could not acquire the calm and coolness
requisite for a process of reasoning. My over-active imagination, as
usual, went off with me, clearing obstacles with a sweeping stride, and
steeplechasing through fact as though it were only a gallop over grass
land.

"Poor girl, well might you look confused and overwhelmed at meeting me!
well might the flush of shame have spread over your neck and shoulders,
and well might you have hurried away from the presence of one who had
known you in the days of your happy innocence!" I am not sure that I did
n't imagine I had been her playfellow in childhood, and that we had been
brought up from infa