She had been on the watch
for that letter every day since Pen had been ill. She had opened some
of his other letters because she wanted to get at that one. She had
the horrid paper poisoning her bag at that moment. She took it out and
offered it to her brother-in-law.
"_Arthur Pendennis, Esq._," he read in a timid little sprawling
handwriting, and with a sneer on his face. "No, my dear, I won't
read any more. But you, who have read it, may tell me what the letter
contains--only prayers for his health in bad spelling, you
say--and a desire to see him? Well--there's no harm in that. And as
you ask me"--here the major began to look a little queer for his own
part, and put on his demure look--"as you ask me, my dear, for
information, why, I don't mind telling you that--ah--that--Morgan, my
man, has made some inquiries regarding this affair, and that--my
friend Doctor Goodenough also looked into it--and it appears that this
person was greatly smitten with Arthur; that he paid for her and took
her to Vauxhall Gardens, as Morgan heard from an old acquaintance of
Pen's and ours, an Irish gentleman, who was very nearly once having
the honor of being the--from an Irishman, in fact;--that the girl's
father, a violent man of intoxicated habits, has beaten her mother,
who persists in declaring her daughter's entire innocence to her
husband on the one hand, while on the other she told Goodenough that
Arthur had acted like a brute to her child.
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