r. When the obsequious but still
curious landlady asked some question about Mr Montague, Mrs Hurtle
seemed to speak very freely on the subject of her late lover,--and to
speak without any great pain. They had put their heads together, she
said, and had found that the marriage would not be suitable. Each of
them preferred their own country, and so they had agreed to part. On
that evening Mrs Hurtle made herself more than usually pleasant,
having the children up into her room, and giving them jam and
bread-and-butter. During the whole of the next fortnight she seemed to
take a delight in doing all in her power for Mrs Pipkin and her
family. She gave toys to the children, and absolutely bestowed upon
Mrs Pipkin a new carpet for the drawing-room. Then Mr Fisker came and
took her away with him to America; and Mrs Pipkin was left,--a desolate
but grateful woman.

'They do tell bad things about them Americans,' she said to a friend
in the street, 'and I don't pretend to know. But for a lodger, I only
wish Providence would send me another just like the one I have lost.
She had that good nature about her she liked to see the bairns eating
pudding just as if they was her own.'

I think Mrs Pipkin was right, and that Mrs Hurtle, with all her
faults, was a good-natured woman.

CHAPTER XCVIII - MARIE MELMOTTE'S FATE

In the meantime Marie Melmotte was living with Madame Melmotte in
their lodgings up at Hampstead, and was taking quite a new look out
into the world. Fisker had become her devoted servant,--not with that
old-fashioned service which meant making love, but with perhaps a
truer devotion to her material interests. He had ascertained on her
behalf that she was the undoubted owner of the money which her father
had made over to her on his first arrival in England,--and she also had
made herself mistress of that fact with equal precision. It would have
astonished those who had known her six months since could they now
have seen how excellent a woman of business she had become, and how
capable she was of making the fullest use of Mr Fisker's services. In
doing him justice it must be owned that he kept nothing back from her
of that which he learned, probably feeling that he might best achieve
success in his present project by such honesty,--feeling also, no doubt,
the girl's own strength in discovering truth and falsehood. 'She's her
father's own daughter,' he said one day to Croll in Abchurch Lane;--for
Croll, thoug