'It is with the inside of your head that I have some business at present, Julia; I will return the outside to the care of your Mrs. Mincing in a few minutes.' 'Lord, papa,' replied Miss Mannering, 'think how entangled all my ideas are, and you to propose to comb them out in a few minutes! If Mincing were to do so in her department she would tear half the hair out of my head.' 'Well then, tell me,' said the Colonel, 'where the entanglement lies, which I will try to extricate with due gentleness?' 'O, everywhere,' said the young lady; 'the whole is a wild dream.' 'Well then, I will try to unriddle it.' He gave a brief sketch of the fate and prospects of Bertram, to which Julia listened with an interest which she in vain endeavoured to disguise. 'Well,' concluded her father, 'are your ideas on the subject more luminous?' 'More confused than ever, my dear sir,' said Julia. 'Here is this young man come from India, after he had been supposed dead, like Aboulfouaris the great voyager to his sister Canzade and his provident brother Hour. I am wrong in the story, I believe--Canzade was his wife; but Lucy may represent the one and the Dominie the other. And then this lively crack-brained Scotch lawyer appears like a pantomime at the end of a tragedy. And then how delightful it will be if Lucy gets back her fortune.' 'Now I think,' said the Colonel, 'that the most mysterious part of the business is, that Miss Julia Mannering, who must have known her father's anxiety about the fate of this young man Brown, or Bertram, as we must now call him, should have met him when Hazlewood's accident took place, and never once mentioned to her father a word of the matter, but suffered the search to proceed against this young gentleman as a suspicious character and assassin.' Julia, much of whose courage had been hastily assumed to meet the interview with her father, was now unable to rally herself; she hung down her head in silence, after in vain attempting to utter a denial that she recollected Brown when she met him. 'No answer! Well, Julia,' continued her father, gravely but kindly, 'allow me to ask you, Is this the only time you have seen Brown since his return from India? Still no answer. I must then naturally suppose that it is not the first time. Still no reply. Julia Mannering, will you have the kindness to answer me? Was it this young man who came under your window and conversed with you during your residence at Mervyn Hall? Julia, I command--I entreat you to be candid.' Miss Mannering raised her head. 'I have been, sir--I believe I am still--very foolish; and it is perhaps more hard upon me that I must meet this gentleman, who has been, though not the cause entirely, yet the accomplice, of my folly, in your presence.' Here she made a full stop. 'I am to understand, then,' said Mannering, 'that this was the author of the serenade at Mervyn Hall?'