"But, bless my wig, child! for your age you had been too much married already--a great deal too much married! You got into the habit of getting married." "Oh! how merciless you are to me!" Rose said, beginning to weep. "No; I am not. I have never been unkind to you--as yet. I don't know what I may be! My course toward you will depend very much upon yourself. Have I not always hitherto been your best friend? Ungrateful, unresponsive though you were at that time, did I not procure for you an invitation from my mother to accompany her party on that long, delightful summer trip?" "I had an impression at the time that I owed the invitation to your father, who suggested to your mother to write and ask me to accompany them." Mr. Fabian looked surprised, and said--for he never hesitated to tell a fib: "Oh! that was quite a mistake. It was I myself who suggested the invitation. I thought it would be agreeable to you. Was it not I myself who sent you forward in advance to the Wirt House, Baltimore, there to await the arrival of our party, and join us in our summer travel? And didn't you have a long, delightful tour with us through the most sublime scenery in the most salubrious climates on earth? Didn't you return a perfect Hebe in health and bloom?" "I acknowledge all that. I acknowledge all my obligations to your family; but at the same time I declare that I also did my part. I was as a white slave to your parents. I was lady's maid to your mother, foot boy to your father. I don't know, indeed, what the old people would have done without me, for no hired servant could have served them as faithfully as I did." "Oh, yes; you were grateful and devoted to all the family except to me, your best friend--to me, who gave you the use of a lovely home, and a liberal income, and a faithful friendship; and then trusted in your sense of justice for my reward." "I would have given you all I possessed in the world--my own poor self in marriage--and you led me on to believe that you wished to marry me, but, finally, you would not have me. You went off and married another woman." "Bah! we are talking around in a circle, and getting back to where we began. Let us come to the point." "Very well; come to the point," said Rose, sulkily. "Listen, then: It is not for your reckless elopement with your step-father's pupil, when you were driven from home by cruelty; it is not for your false marriage with Stillwater, when you yourself were deceived; but because with all these antecedents against you--antecedents which constituted you, however unjustly, a pariah, who should have lived quietly and obscurely, but who, instead of doing so, took advantage of kindness shown her, and betrayed the family who sheltered her by luring into a disgraceful marriage its revered father, and bringing to deep dishonor the gray head of Aaron Rockharrt, a man of stern integrity and unblemished reputation--you should be denounced and punished."