how much must depend on the answer which her mother had brought back from London, and knowing nothing of the contents of the letter which Arabella had received that morning from the lawyer.  In a moment or two Lady Augustus followed her daughter upstairs, and on going into her own room found the damsel standing in the middle of it with an open paper in her hand.  “Mamma,” she said, “shut the door.”  Then the door was closed.  “What is the meaning of this?” and she held out the lawyer’s letter.

“The meaning of what?” said Lady Augustus, trembling.

“I have no doubt you know, but you had better read it”

Lady Augustus read the letter and attempted to smile.  “He has been very quick,” she said.  “I thought I should have been the first to tell you.”

“What is the meaning of it?  Why is the man to give me all that money?”

“Is it not a good escape from so great a trouble?  Think what 8,000 pounds will do.  It will enable you to live in comfort wherever you may please to go.”

“I am to understand then you have sold me,—­sold all my hopes and my very name and character, for 8,000 pounds!”

“Your name and character will not be touched, my dear.  As for his marrying you I soon found that that was absolutely out of the question.”

“This is what has come of sending you to see him!  Of course I shall tell my uncle everything.”

“You will do no such thing.  Arabella, do not make a fool of yourself.  Do you know what 8,000 pounds will do for you?  It is to be your own,—­absolutely beyond my reach or your father’s.”

“I would sooner go into the Thames off Waterloo Bridge than touch a farthing of his money,” said Arabella with a spirit which the other woman did not at all understand.  Hitherto in all these little dirty ways they had run with equal steps.  The pretences, the subterfuges, the lies of the one had always been open to the other.  Arabella, earnest in supplying herself with gloves from the pockets of her male acquaintances, had endured her mother’s tricks with complacency.  She had condescended when living in humble lodgings to date her letters from a well-known hotel, and had not feared to declare that she had done so in their family conversations.  Together they had fished in turbid waters for marital nibbles and had told mutual falsehoods to unbelieving tradesmen.  And yet the younger woman, when tempted with a bribe worth lies and tricks as deep and as black as Acheron, now stood on her dignity and her purity and stamped her foot with honest indignation!

“I don’t think you can understand it,” said Lady Augustus.

“I can understand this,—­that you have betrayed me; and that I shall tell him so in the plainest words that I can use.  To get his lawyer to write and offer me money!”

“He should not have gone to his lawyer.  I do think he was wrong there.”

“But you settled it with him; you, my mother;—­a price at which he should buy himself off!  Would he have offered me money if he did not know that he had bound himself to me?”