which seemed to imply that all that prospect
was over.

"Of course," said Lizzie querulously, "I am very anxious to know what
he thinks. I care more about his opinion than anybody else's. As to
his name being mixed up in it,--that is all a joke."

"It has been no joke to him, I can assure you," said Mrs. Carbuncle.
Lizzie could not press her request. Of course, she knew more about it
than did Mrs. Carbuncle. The secret was in her own bosom,--the secret
as to the midnight robbery at Carlisle, and that secret she had told
to Lord George. As to the robbery in London she knew nothing,--except
that it had been perpetrated through the treachery of Patience
Crabstick. Did Lord George know more about it than she knew?--and if
so, was he now deterred by that knowledge from visiting her? "You
see, my dear," said Mrs. Carbuncle, "that a gentleman visiting a lady
with whom he has no connexion, in her bedroom, is in itself something
very peculiar." Lizzie made a motion of impatience under the
bedclothes. Any such argument was trash to her, and she knew that it
was trash to Mrs. Carbuncle also. What was one man in her bedroom
more than another? She could see a dozen doctors if she pleased, and
if so, why not this man, whose real powers of doctoring her would be
so much more efficacious? "You would want to see him alone, too,"
continued Mrs. Carbuncle, "and, of course, the police would hear of
it. I am not at all surprised that he should stay away." Lizzie's
condition did not admit of much argument on her side, and she only
showed her opposition to Mrs. Carbuncle by being cross and querulous.

Frank Greystock came to her with great constancy almost every day,
and from him she did hear about the robbery all that he knew or
heard. When three days had passed,--when six days, and even when
ten days were gone, nobody had been as yet arrested. The police,
according to Frank, were much on the alert, but were very secret.
They either would not, or could not, tell anything. To him the two
robberies, that at Carlisle and the last affair in Hertford Street,
were of course distinct. There were those who believed that the
Hertford Street thieves and the Carlisle thieves were not only the
same, but that they had been in quest of the same plunder,--and had
at last succeeded. But Frank was not one of these. He never for a
moment doubted that the diamonds had been taken at Carlisle, and
explained the second robbery by the supposition that Patience