Meanwhile, Houseman turned musingly back, and regained his room, muttering, "Yes--yes--my business here is also done! Competence and safety abroad--after all, what a bugbear is this conscience!--fourteen years have rolled away--and lo! nothing discovered! nothing known! And easy circumstances--the very consequence of the deed--wait the remainder of my days:--my child, too--my Jane--shall not want--shall not be a beggar nor a harlot." So musing, Houseman threw himself contentedly on the chair, and the last flicker of the expiring light, as it played upward on his rugged countenance--rested on one of those self-hugging smiles, with which a sanguine man contemplates a satisfactory future. He had not been long alone, before the door opened; and a woman with a light in her hand appeared. She was evidently intoxicated, and approached Houseman with a reeling and unsteady step. "How now, Bess? drunk as usual. Get to bed, you she shark, go!" "Tush, man, tush! don't talk to your betters," said the woman, sinking into a chair; and her situation, disgusting as it was, could not conceal the rare, though somewhat coarse beauty of her face and person. Even Houseman, (his heart being opened, as it were, by the cheering prospects of which his soliloquy had indulged the contemplation,) was sensible of the effect of the mere physical attraction, and drawing his chair closer to her, he said in a tone less harsh than usual. "Come, Bess, come, you must correct that d--d habit of yours; perhaps I may make a lady of you after all. What if I were to let you take a trip with me to France, old girl, eh? and let you set off that handsome face, for you are devilish handsome, and that's the truth of it, with some of the French gewgaws you women love. What if. I were? would you be a good girl, eh?" "I think I would, Dick,--I think I would," replied the woman, showing a set of teeth as white as ivory, with pleasure partly at the flattery, partly at the proposition: "you are a good fellow, Dick, that you are." "Humph!" said Houseman, whose hard, shrewd mind was not easily cajoled, "but what's that paper in your bosom, Bess? a love-letter, I'll swear." "'Tis to you then; came to you this morning, only somehow or other, I forgot to give it you till now!" "Ha! a letter to me?" said Houseman, seizing the epistle in question. "Hem! the Knaresbro' postmark--my mother-in-law's crabbed hand, too! what can the old crone want?" He opened the letter, and hastily scanning its contents, started up. "Mercy, mercy!" cried he, "my child is ill, dying. I may never see her again,--my only child,--the only thing that loves me,--that does not loath me as a villain!" "Heyday, Dicky!" said the woman, clinging to him, "don't take on so, who so fond of you as me?--what's a brat like that!"