hat
she had not a penny, that the girl was an adventurer, and that Sir
Griffin was an obstinate, pig-headed, ruined idiot. It was expedient
on every account that Lizzie should take herself away from that
"lot." The answer that Lizzie desired to make was very simple. Let me
go as your betrothed bride, and I will start to-morrow,--to Scotland
or elsewhere, as you may direct. Let that little affair be settled,
and I shall be quite as willing to get out of London as you can be to
send me. But I am in such a peck of troubles that something must be
settled. And as it seems that after all the police are still astray
about the necklace, perhaps I needn't run away from them for a little
while even yet. She did not say this. She did not even in so many
words make the first proposition. But she did endeavour to make Frank
understand that she would obey his dictation if he would earn the
right to dictate. He either did not or would not understand her, and
then she became angry with him,--or pretended to be angry. "Really,
Frank," she said, "you are hardly fair to me."

"In what way am I unfair?"

"You come here and abuse all my friends, and tell me to go here and
go there, just as though I were a child. And--and--and--"

"And what, Lizzie?"

"You know what I mean. You are one thing one day, and one another. I
hope Miss Lucy Morris was quite well when you last heard from her."

"You have no right to speak to me of Lucy,--at least, not in
disparagement."

"You are treating her very badly;--you know that."

"I am."

"Then why don't you give it up? Why don't you let her have her
chances,--to do what she can with them? You know very well that you
can't marry her. You know that you ought not to have asked her. You
talk of Miss Roanoke and Sir Griffin Tewett. There are people quite
as bad as Sir Griffin,--or Mrs. Carbuncle either. Don't suppose I am
speaking for myself. I've given up all that idle fancy long ago. I
shall never marry a second time myself. I have made up my mind to
that. I have suffered too much already." Then she burst into tears.

He dried her tears and comforted her, and forgave all the injurious
things she had said of him. It is almost impossible for a man,--a man
under forty and unmarried, and who is not a philosopher,--to have
familiar and affectionate intercourse with a beautiful young woman,
and carry it on as he might do with a friend of the other sex. In his
very heart Greystock despised this woman; he