on of the person who had
tampered with the packet. She looked at me with an icy smile, and
answered in ironical accents, which were even more chilling than the
atmosphere of her parlour,--

"Do not ask if I know who has tampered with those letters, Mr.
Hawkehurst. Your affectation of surprise has been remarkably well put
on; but I am not to be deceived a second time. When you came to me in
the first instance, I had my suspicions; but you came furnished with a
note from my brother, and as a Christian I repressed those suspicions.
I know now that I have been the dupe of an impostor, and that in
entrusting those letters to you I entrusted them to an emissary and
tool of THEODORE JUDSON."

I protested that I had never to my knowledge set eyes upon either of
the Theodore Judsons; but the prejudiced kinswoman of those gentlemen
shook her head with a smile whose icy blandness was eminently
exasperating.

"I am not to be deceived a second time," she said. "Who else but
Theodore Judson should have employed you? Who else but Theodore Judson
is interested in the Haygarth fortune? O, it was like him to employ a
stranger where he knew his own efforts would be unavailing; it was like
him to hoodwink me by the agency of a hireling tool."

I had been addressed as a "young man" by the reverend Jonah, and now I
was spoken of as a "hireling tool" by Miss Judson. I scarcely knew
which was most disagreeable, and I began to think that board and
lodging in the present, and a visionary three thousand pounds in the
future, would scarcely compensate me for such an amount of ignominy.

I went back to my inn utterly crestfallen--a creature so abject that
even the degrading influence of influenza could scarcely sink me any
lower in the social scale. I wrote a brief and succinct account of my
proceedings, and despatched the same to George Sheldon, and then I sat
down in my sickness and despair, as deeply humiliated as Ajax when he
found that he had been pitching into sheep instead of Greeks, as
miserable as Job amongst his dust and ashes, but I am happy to say
untormented by the chorus of one or the friends of the other. In that
respect at least I had some advantage over both.

_October 13th_. This morning's post brought me a brief scrawl from
Sheldon.

"Come back to town directly. I have found the registry of Matthew
Haygarth's marriage."

And so I turn my back on Ullerton; with what rejoicing of spirit it is
not in language to express.