"Soh!... Here I am then, after six months' trial of the travelling system, and a multitude of experiments in fashionable society, just seven hundred pounds poorer than when I set out, and without having advanced a single inch towards a second marriage.... This will never do!... My youth, my beauty, and my fortune will all melt away together before the object is obtained, unless I change my plans, and find out some better mode of proceeding." Here Mrs. Barnaby sipped her vile tea, opened her work-box that she had been constrained to leave so hastily, ascertained that the exquisite collar she was working had received no injury during her absence, and then resumed her meditations. "Heigh ho!... It is most horribly dull, sitting in this way all by one's-self ... even that good-for-nothing, stupid, ungrateful Agnes was better to look at than nothing; ... and even in that horrid Fleet there was some pleasure in knowing that there was an elegant, interesting man, to be met in a passage now and then ... whose eyes spoke plainly enough what he thought of me.... Poor fellow!... His being in misfortune ought not to produce ill-will to him in a generous mind!... How he looked as he said 'Adieu, then, madam!... With you vanishes the last ray of light that will ever reach my heart!'... And I am sure he said exactly what he felt, and no more.... Poor O'Donagough!... My heart aches for him!" And here she fell into a very piteous and sentimental mood, indeed. Had her soliloquy been spoken out as loud as words could utter it, nobody would have heard a syllable about love, marriage, or any such nonsense; her heart was at this time altogether given up to pity, compassion, and a deep sense of the duties of a Christian; and before she went to bed she had reasoned herself very satisfactorily into the conviction that, as a tender-hearted woman and a believer, it was her bounden duty, now that she had got out of trouble herself, to return to the Fleet for the purpose of once more seeing Mr. O'Donagough, and inquiring whether it was in her power to do anything to serve him before she left London. Nothing more surely tends to soothe the spirits and calm the agitated nerves than an amiable and pious resolution, taken, as this was done, during the last waning hours of the day, and just before the languid body lays itself down to rest. Mrs. Barnaby slept like a top after coming to the determination that, let the turnkeys think what they would of it, she would call at the Fleet Prison, and ask to see Mr. O'Donagough, the following morning. The following morning came, and found the benevolent widow stedfast in her purpose; and yet, to her honour be it spoken, it was not without some struggles with a feeling which many might have called shame, but which she conscientiously condemned as pride, that she set forth at length upon her adventurous expedition.