and she had played me false. Designing to do her honour, I had done her
the greatest dishonour--but through her means. Blind fool that I was!
Playing the husband, complacently accepting her play of the wife as
serious. O Heaven, and she had let me ruin her, and now was gone! I own
that I was angry at being made the victim of a trick, indignant at
having been forced into a thing which I should never have dreamed of
doing. But when I turned severely to Miriam and accused her of being a
party to the fraud, she laughed in my face, and put the case before me
in a way which made me sing a tune in the minor. "Fiddlededee!" she
retorted, her arms stuck out akimbo, "what in the world had I to do with
your fooleries? 'Twas the girl arranged it all--and for reasons which do
her more credit than YOU seem able to do her. I think she's a very good
girl--a thousand times too good for you. If you find her again I shall
be sorry for her--and I'll tell you this much, that I shan't help you."

She had me pleading after this; but it took two or three visits and very
liberal treatment before she would condescend to tell me anything.
Finally, however, she gave it as her opinion that Fra Palamone, whom I
had been so short-sighted as to dismiss, was more likely to know of her
whereabouts than any one; and that I had better beware of the Marchese
Semifonte, a man well known to her. She plainly told me that she thought
next to nothing of my chances, and that the best thing I could do was to
go back to England. "You don't understand our women, nor will you ever--
you and the likes of you," she said. "They have more sound sense in
their little fingers than your nation in its collected Parliament. Do
you imagine a girl like Virginia wants to be your lady? What on earth
should she do in such a place? Lie on a couch and order menservants
about? Oh, preposterous! What pleasures does Virginia know but those of
bed and board and hoard? She'll be merry in the first, and hearty at the
second, and passionate for filling the crock with gold pieces. But your