Lord George, too, took their side, and wanted to get angry at my unjust suspicions about Mrs. G., but I just said, what would the world think of _me_ if I went away in a chaise and four with _him_ by way of paying a visit to somebody that never existed? He tried to laugh it off, Molly, and made little of it, but I wouldn't let him, in particular before Mary Anne,--for whatever sins they may lay to my charge, I believe that they can't pretend that I did n't bring up the girls with sound principles of virtue and morality,--and just to convince him of that, I turned to and exposed K. I. to James and the two girls till they were well ashamed of him. It's a heartless bad world we live in, Molly! and I never knew its badness, I may say, till now. You'll scarce believe me, when I tell you that it was n't from my own flesh and blood that I met comfort or sympathy, but from that good-for-nothing creature, Betty Cobb. Mary Anne and Caroline persisted in saying that K. I.'s journey was all innocence and purity,--that he was only gone in a fatherly sort of a way with her; but Betty knew the reverse, and I must own that she seemed to know more about him than I ever suspected. "Ah, the ould rogue!--the ould villain!" she 'd mutter to herself, in a fashion that showed me the character he had in the servants' hall. If I had only a little command of my temper, I might have found out many a thing of him, Molly, and of his doings at Dodsborough, but how could I at a moment like that? And that's how I was, Molly, with nothing but enemies about me, in the bosom of my own family! One saying, "Don't expose us to the world,--don't bring people's eyes on us;" and the other calling out, "We 'll be ruined entirely if it gets into the papers!" so that, in fact, they wanted to deny me the little bit of sympathy I might have attracted towards my destitute and forlorn condition. Had I been at home, in Dodsborough, I'd have made the country ring with his disgrace; but they wouldn't let me utter a word here, and I was obliged to sit down, as the poet says, "like a worm in the bud," and consume my grief in solitude.