'I am Miss Carbury,' said Hetta in a very low voice.
'Oh, indeed;--Miss Carbury!--the sister of Sir Felix Carbury?' There was something in the tone of the man's voice which grated painfully on Hetta's ears,--but she answered the question. 'Oh;--Sir Felix's sister! May I be permitted to ask whether--you have any business with my daughter?' The story was a hard one to tell, with all the workmen around her, in the midst of the lumber, with the coarse face of the suspicious man looking down upon her; but she did tell it very simply. She had come with a message from her brother. There had been something between her brother and Miss Melmotte, and her brother had felt that it would be best that he should acknowledge that it must be all over. 'I wonder whether that is true,' said Melmotte, looking at her out of his great coarse eyes, with his eyebrows knit, with his hat on his head and his hands in his pockets. Hetta, not knowing how, at the moment, to repudiate the suspicion expressed, was silent. 'Because, you know, there has been a deal of falsehood and double dealing. Sir Felix has behaved infamously; yes,--by G----, infamously. A day or two before my daughter started, he gave me a written assurance that the whole thing was over, and now he sends you here. How am I to know what you are really after?'
'I have come because I thought I could do some good,' she said, trembling with anger and fear. 'I was speaking to your daughter at your party.'
'Oh, you were there;--were you? It may be as you say, but how is one to tell? When one has been deceived like that, one is apt to be suspicious, Miss Carbury.' Here was one who had spent his life in lying to the world, and who was in his very heart shocked at the atrocity of a man who had lied to him! 'You are not plotting another journey to Liverpool;--are you?' To this Hetta could make no answer. The insult was too much, but alone, unsupported, she did not know how to give him back scorn for scorn. At last he proposed to take her across to Bruton Street himself and at his bidding she walked by his side. 'May I hear what you say to her?' he asked.
'If you suspect me, Mr Melmotte, I had better not see her at all. It is only that there may no longer be any doubt.'
'You can say it all before me.'