No such good fortune awaited her. The door was opened almost immediately; Mr. Scriven was at home, and she was shown up to his drawing-room. He had got three printed papers before him, the London "Gazette," the "Shipping List," and another, I don't know what, besides a little scrap of white paper, not bigger than my hand--for Mr. Scriven was very careful of his paper--on which he was jotting down various cabalistic signs and a number of figures, which nobody in Europe could have made anything of but himself. The result did not seem satisfactory to him, however, for his face was certainly gloomy; and, pointing with the butt-end of his pencil to a chair, he uttered the laconic and incomplete sentence, "In a minute," and then went on with his calculations again. Lady Fleetwood sat down; and perhaps no worse mode of torture could have been devised by Mr. Scriven than that of making her wait in silence; for she did not employ the interval calmly and orderly, in thinking what she had best do, but suffered _pros_ and _cons_, and the recollections of everything that had taken place between Maria and herself, and Mr. Bowes and herself, and all the deductions she had formerly drawn, and all the doubts which had since sprung up, and a great many other considerations besides, to settle down upon her like a swarm of bees, and sting her till she was half mad with the irritation. Her mind was in a very swollen and inflamed state when Mr. Scriven stopped, folded up the paper, and put it in his waistcoat pocket, drew in the nose of his pencil, like the head of a tortoise into its shell, and then, looking straight at Lady Fleetwood, said-- "Well, Margaret, what do you want? I could not come at eleven, for, as you see, I had something else to do; but I suppose your business is important, or you would not hunt me down here." His uncivil speech gave Lady Fleetwood an opportunity of escape, if she had had wit enough to avail herself of it: and indeed she did make an effort, though it was not a very successful one. "Oh, I don't want to disturb you at all," she said; "I did not know you were particularly engaged." Had she stopped there, it would have been all very well; for her brother, in his dry, unpleasant way, was just about to say that he _was_ particularly engaged, and the matter might have dropped. But Lady Fleetwood was a terrible person for standing upon the defensive. She did not at all like the very insinuation of trifling; and she added, unluckily-- "Of course, what I wanted to say was important, or I should not have asked you to come, and should not have come here." "Well, what is it?" asked Mr. Scriven. "I suppose you have got into some important scrape, and want me to get you out of it." "Not at all," answered Lady Fleetwood, with an indignant air: "I wished merely to speak with you, not about myself, but about Maria and Colonel Middleton."