her way towards the church in good earnest, while the other steered her
course in another direction. The duenna, after a moment's suspense and
consideration, divined the true cause of this short visit, and resolved
to watch the motions of the confidant, whom she traced to the academy in
which our hero lodged, and from which she saw her return, after the
supposed message was delivered.

Fraught with this intelligence, the rancorous understrapper hied her home
to the jeweller's wife, and made a faithful recital of what she had seen,
communicating at the same time her own conjectures on that subject. Her
employer was equally astonished and incensed at this information. She
was seized with all that frenzy which takes possession of a slighted
woman, when she finds herself supplanted by a detested rival; and, in the
first transports of her indignation, devoted them as sacrifices to her
vengeance. Nor was her surprise so much the effect of his dissimulation,
as of his want of taste and discernment. She inveighed against him, not
as the most treacherous lover, but as the most abject wretch, in courting
the smiles of such an awkward dowdy, while he enjoyed the favours of a
woman who had numbered princes in the train of her admirers. For the
brilliancy of her attractions, such as they at present shone, she
appealed to the decision of her minister, who consulted her own
satisfaction and interest, by flattering the other's vanity and
resentment; and so unaccountable did the depravity of our hero's judgment
appear to this conceited dame, that she began to believe there was some
mistake in the person, and to hope that Wilhelmina's gallant was not in
reality her professed admirer, Mr. Fathom, but rather one of his
fellow-lodgers, whose passion he favoured with his mediation and
assistance.

On this notion, which nothing but mere vanity could have inspired, in
opposition to so many more weighty presumptions, she took the resolution
of bringing the affair to a fuller explanation, before she would concert
any measures to the prejudice of our adventurer, and forthwith despatched
her spy back to his lodgings, to solicit, on the part of Wilhelmina, an
immediate answer to the letter he had received. This was an expedition
with which the old maiden would have willingly dispensed, because it was
founded upon an uncertainty, which might be attended with troublesome
consequences; but, rather than be the means of retarding a negotiation s