"
"Your are sure of that!"
"Perfectly. I met an Italian fellow at Vienna who told me how it was
all managed by the Genoese bankers."
"Ah! I was just thinking that you would be the only person who could
be of use--you who know foreign languages and all their ways. If you
could go abroad, and arrange it for me!"
"If my daughter were restored---" began the Major.
"I see what you would say, and I am convinced that the first step
towards the discovery would be to put Mr. Belamour under restraint,
and separate his black from him. Then one or other of them would
speak, and we might know how she has been played upon."
"What does your Ladyship suppose then?" asked the Major.
"This is what I imagine. The poor silly maid repents herself and
comes back in search of me. Would that she had found me, her best
friend! But instead of that, she falls in with old Belamour, and
he, having by this time perceived the danger of the perilous
masquerade in which he had involved my unlucky boy, a minor, has
mewed her up somewhere, till the cry should be over."
"That would be the part of a villain, but scarcely of a madman,"
said Betty dryly.
"My dear cousin Betty, there are lunatics endowed with a marvellous
shrewdness to commit senseless villanies, and to put on a specious
seeming.
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