"Madam," I replied, "as long as you dealt with tradesmen accustomed to depend on aristocratic customers, your rank and position, and their large profits, protected you from suspicion; but you have made a mistake in descending from your vantage ground to make a poor shopman your innocent accomplice--a man who will be keenly alive to any thing that may injure his wife or children. His terrors--but for my interposition--would have ruined you utterly. Tell me, how many of these things have you put afloat?" She seemed a little taken aback by this speech, but was wonderfully firm. She passed her white, jewelled hand over her eyes, seemed calculating, and then whispered, with a confiding look of innocent helplessness, admirably assumed, "About as many as amount to twelve hundred pounds." "And what means have you for meeting them?" At this question, so plainly put, her face flushed. She half rose from her chair, and exclaimed, in the true tone of aristocratic _hauteur_--"Really, sir, I do not know what right you have to ask me that question." I laughed a little, though not very loud. It was rude, I own; but who could have helped it? I replied, speaking low; but slowly and distinctly:--"You forget. I did not send for you: you came to me. You have forged bills to the amount of twelve hundred pounds. Yours is not the case of a ruined merchant, or an ignorant over-tempted clerk. In your case a jury" (she shuddered at that word) "would find no extenuating circumstances; and if you should fall into the hands of justice, you will be convicted, degraded, clothed in a prison dress, and transported for life. I do not want to speak harshly; but I insist that you find means to take up the bill which Mr. Axminster has so unwittingly endorsed!"