there. It's not half so nice
as here. You'll be bored there. I am. My wife is as gay as Lady
Macbeth, and my daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril. I daren't
sleep in what they call my bedroom. The bed is like the baldaquin of
St. Peter's, and the pictures frighten me. I have a little brass bed
in a dressing-room, and a little hair mattress like an anchorite. I am
an anchorite. Ho! ho! You'll be asked to dinner next week. And gare
aux femmes, look out and hold your own! How the women will bully you!"
This was a very long speech for a man of few words like my Lord Steyne;
nor was it the first which he uttered for Becky's benefit on that day.

Briggs looked up from the work-table at which she was seated in the
farther room and gave a deep sigh as she heard the great Marquis speak
so lightly of her sex.

"If you don't turn off that abominable sheep-dog," said Lord Steyne,
with a savage look over his shoulder at her, "I will have her poisoned."

"I always give my dog dinner from my own plate," said Rebecca, laughing
mischievously; and having enjoyed for some time the discomfiture of my
lord, who hated poor Briggs for interrupting his tete-a-tete with the
fair Colonel's wife, Mrs. Rawdon at length had pity upon her admirer,
and calling to Briggs, praised the fineness of the weather to her and
bade her to take out the child for a walk.

"I can't send her away," Becky said presently, after a pause, and in a
very sad voice. Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke, and she
turned away her head.

"You owe her her wages, I suppose?" said the Peer.

"Worse than that," said Becky, still casting down her eyes; "I have
ruined her."

"Ruined her? Then why don't you turn her out?" the gentleman asked.

"Men do that," Becky answered bitterly. "Women are not so bad as you.
Last year, when we were reduced to our last guinea, she gave us
everything. She shall never leave me, until we are ruined utterly
ourselves, which does not seem far off, or until I can pay her the
utmost farthing."

"------ it, how much is it?" said the Peer with an oath. And Becky,
reflecting on the largeness of his means, mentioned not only the sum
which she had borrowed from Miss Briggs, but one of nearly double the
amount.

This caused the Lord Steyne to break out in another brief and energetic
expression of anger, at which Rebecca held down her head the more and
cried bitterly. "I could not help it. It was my only chance. I dare
n