asped at was that, so oddly, he was ahead of her at the start. "Yes,
I want something of you, Julia, and I want it right now: you can do me
a turn, and I'm blest if my luck--which has once or twice been
pretty good, you know--hasn't sent you to me." She knew the luck he
meant--that of her mother's having so enabled him to get rid of her;
but it was the nearest allusion of the merely invidious kind that he
would make. It had thus come to our young woman on the spot and by
divination: the service he desired of her matched with remarkable
closeness what she had so promptly taken into her head to name to
himself--to name in her own interest, though deterred as yet from
having brought it right out. She had been prevented by his speaking,
the first thing, in that way, as if he had known Mr. French--which
surprised her till he explained that every one in New York knew by
appearance a young man of his so-quoted wealth ("What did she take
them all in New York then _for_?") and of whose marked attention to
her he had moreover, for himself, round at clubs and places, lately
heard. This had accompanied the inevitable free question "Was she
engaged to _him_ now?"--which she had in fact almost welcomed as
holding out to her the perch of opportunity. She was waiting to deal
with it properly, but meanwhile he had gone on, and to such effect
that it took them but three minutes to turn out, on either side, like
a pair of pickpockets comparing, under shelter, their day's booty, the
treasures of design concealed about their persons.

"I want you to tell the truth for me--as you only can. I want you to
say that I was really all right--as right as you know; and that I
simply acted like an angel in a story-book, gave myself away to have
it over."

"Why, my dear man," Julia cried, "you take the wind straight out of my
sails! What I'm here to ask of _you_ is that you'll confess to having
been even a worse fiend than you were shown up for; to having made
it impossible mother should _not_ take proceedings." There!--she had
brought it out, and with the sense of their situation turning to high
excitement for her in the teeth of his droll stare, his strange grin,
his characteristic "Lordy, lordy! What good will that do you?" She
was prepared with her clear statement of reasons for her appeal, and
feared so he might have better ones for his own that all her story
came in a flash. "Well, Mr. Pitman, I want to get married this time,
by way of a chang