“I conclude you must,” said she, smiling; “and I too must make a suitable toilette;” and, with a slight bow and a little smile, she swept past them out of the room. “How close you have been, old fellow,--close as wax,--about this,” said Beecher; “and hang me, if she mightn't be daughter to the proudest Duke in England!” “So she might,” said Grog; “and it was to make her so, I have consented to this life of separation. What respect and deference would the fellows show _my_ daughter when I wasn't by? How much delicacy would she meet with when the fear of an ounce ball wasn't over them? And was I going to bring her up in such a set as you and I live with? Was a young creature like that to begin the world without seeing one man that wasn't a leg, or one woman that wasn't worse? Was it by lessons of robbery and cheating her mind was to be stored? And was she to start in life by thinking that a hell was high society? Look at her _now_,” said he, sternly, “and say if I was in Norfolk Island to-morrow, where 's the fellow that would have the pluck to insult her? It is true _she_ doesn't know me as you and the others know me; but the man that would let her into _that_ secret would never tell her another.” There was a terrible fierceness in his eye as he spoke, and the words came from him with a hissing sound like the venomous threatenings of a serpent. “_She_ knows nothing of _my_ life nor _my_ ways. Except your own name, she never heard me mention one of the fellows we live with. She knows _you_ to be the brother of Lord Viscount Lack-ington, and that you are the Honorable Annesley Beecher, that's all she knows of _you_; ain't that little enough?” Beecher tried to laugh easily at this speech; but it was only a very poor and faint attempt, after all. “She thinks _me_ a man of fortune, and _you_ an unblemished gentleman; and if that be not innocence, I 'd like to know what is! Of where, how, and with whom we pick up our living, she knows as much as _we_ do about the Bench of Bishops.” “I must confess I don't think the knowledge would improve her!” said Beecher, with a laugh. A fierce and savage glance from Davis, however, very quickly arrested his jocularity; and Beecher, in a graver tone, resumed: “It was a deuced fine thing of you, Grog, to do this. There 's not another fellow living would have bad the head to think of it But now that she has come home to you, how do you mean to carry on the campaign? A girl like that can't live secluded from the world,--she must go out into society? Have you thought of that?” “I have thought of it,” rejoined Davis, bluntly, but in a tone that by no means invited further inquiry. “Her style and her manner fit her for the best set anywhere--” “That's where I intend her to be,” broke in Davis.