“I am not at all sure,” I replied after thinking; “for we never happened to talk of that. She was at a good school for a little time; and then that hateful woman, her stepmother, took her away when she was doing well, and sent her to a wretched place at £20 a year. She can read French, I know, because I asked her something; but I doubt whether she can speak it.” “Then that’s where she is. I begin to smell a rat. He took her from Southampton, depend upon it. And now I twig some bit of meaning in that copper saint. The south of France—that’s where she is.” “But why in the south of France, more than any other part?” I thought that he was jumping rather fast to his conclusions. “Well, it might be Italy, or Spain,” he answered, with a fine generosity; “I can’t say very much about it. But a brother of mine was at sea, till he was drowned, and he traded a good deal from the south of France; and he had one of those things in his hat, because of being struck by lightning. They get it very bad in those waters, he declared; but I can’t call to mind the name of the saint that stops it. Of course I have no faith in such stuff, though there might be nothing to laugh at, after all I have seen about horses. But there it is. They stick those things up, as an officer’s coachman mounts a cockade; and bad luck it was for Master Downy’s knuckles. His hand was like a pease-pudding yesterday. His flesh is always of a yellow nature, like a Cochin China’s. Shouldn’t wonder a bit, if he got lockjaw.” “Not till I have settled with him.” It made me forget the Rev. Peter, and all his style of regarding things, when people spoke as if right and wrong had an equal claim upon the Lord in heaven. CHAPTER LII. A WANDERING GLEAM. MY uncle, however, was not like that. He had suffered too largely from rogues himself, in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden, to have any calm way of considering them. “Either a man is honest through and through, or else he is a thief all over. It is humbug to talk as if a fellow didn’t know when he is stealing, or when he is not. He knows it pretty sharp when it is done to him; and he puts it short, as he has a right to do. And then he turns the corner, and he wipes his mouth, and serves others with the dose that made him sputter. To cheat the man that cheated you, is Christian enough; but not to pass it on to other people. Ask Mr. Golightly what he thinks about it.”