. I shall certainly go. I will go at once.
It is very disagreeable, but I cannot possibly refuse. It would be
abominable.' Then going back to the hall, he sent a message by the
butler to Marie, saying that he would be with her in less than half an
hour.

'Don't you go and make a fool of yourself,' his father said to him
when he was alone. 'This is just one of those times when a man may
ruin himself by being softhearted.' Nidderdale simply shook his head
as he took his hat and gloves to go across to Bruton Street.

CHAPTER LXXXVI - THE MEETING IN BRUTON STREET

When the news of her husband's death was in some very rough way
conveyed to Madame Melmotte, it crushed her for the time altogether.
Marie first heard that she no longer had a living parent as she stood
by the poor woman's bedside, and she was enabled, as much perhaps by
the necessity incumbent upon her of attending to the wretched woman as
by her own superior strength of character, to save herself from that
prostration and collapse of power which a great and sudden blow is apt
to produce. She stared at the woman who first conveyed to her tidings
of the tragedy, and then for a moment seated herself at the bedside.
But the violent sobbings and hysterical screams of Madame Melmotte
soon brought her again to her feet, and from that moment she was not
only active but efficacious. No;--she would not go down to the room;
she could do no good by going thither. But they must send for a doctor.
They should send for a doctor immediately. She was then told that a
doctor and an inspector of police were already in the rooms below. The
necessity of throwing whatever responsibility there might be on to
other shoulders had been at once apparent to the servants, and they
had sent out right and left, so that the house might be filled with
persons fit to give directions in such an emergency. The officers from
the police station were already there when the woman who now filled
Didon's place in the house communicated to Madame Melmotte the fact
that she was a widow.

It was afterwards said by some of those who had seen her at the time,
that Marie Melmotte had shown a hard heart on the occasion. But the
condemnation was wrong. Her feeling for her father was certainly not
that which we are accustomed to see among our daughters and sisters.
He had never been to her the petted divinity of the household, whose
slightest wish had been law, whose little comforts had become matter