serving it.
You deserve it, if anybody does. Didn't you tell me you were looking
for a book? And didn't I present it to you promiscuously, with the
best intentions? I think you might say so yourself, now the doctor has
brought you to again. I think you might speak up for a poor girl who is
worked to death with singing and languages and what not--a poor girl who
has nobody else to speak for her. I am as respectable as you are, if
you come to that. My name is Hoighty. My parents are in business, and my
mamma has seen better days, and mixed in the best of company."

There Miss Hoighty lifted her handkerchief again to her face, and burst
modestly into tears behind it.

It was certainly hard to hold her responsible for what had happened.
I answered as kindly as I could, and I attempted to speak to Major
Fitz-David in her defense. He knew what terrible anxieties were
oppressing me at that moment; and, considerately refusing to hear a
word, he took the task of consoling his young prima donna entirely on
himself. What he said to her I neither heard nor cared to hear: he spoke
in a whisper. It ended in his pacifying Miss Hoighty, by kissing her
hand, and leading her (as he might have led a duchess) out of the room.

"I hope that foolish girl has not annoyed you--at such a time as this,"
he said, very earnestly, when he returned to the sofa. "I can't tell you
how grieved I am at what has happened. I was careful to warn you, as you
may remember. Still, if I could only have foreseen--"

I let him proceed no further. No human forethought could have provided
against what had happened. Besides, dreadful as the discovery had been,
I would rather have made it, and suffered under it, as I was suffering
now, than have been kept in the dark. I told him this. And then I turned
to the one subject that was now of any interest to me--the subject of my
unhappy husband.

"How did he come to this house?" I asked.

"He came here with Mr. Benjamin shortly after I returned," the Major
replied.

"Long after I was taken ill?"

"No. I had just sent for the doctor--feeling seriously alarmed about
you."

"What brought him here? Did he return to the hotel and miss me?"

"Yes. He returned earlier than he had anticipated, and he felt uneasy at
not finding you at the hotel."

"Did he suspect me of being with you? Did he come here from the hotel?"

"No. He appears to have gone first to Mr. Benjamin to inquire about you.
What he heard from your