In the meantime Marie Melmotte was living with Madame Melmotte in their lodgings¹ up at Hampstead, and was taking quite a new look out into the world. Fisker had become her devoted² servant — not with that old-fashioned service which meant making love, but with perhaps a truer devotion to her material interests. He had ascertained³ on her behalf that she was the undoubted owner of the money which her father had made over to her on his first arrival in England — and she also had made herself mistress of that fact with equal precision. It would have astonished those who had known her six months since could they now have seen how excellent a woman of business she had become, and how capable she was of making the fullest use of Mr Fisker’s services. In doing him justice it must be owned that he kept nothing back from her of that which he learned, probably feeling that he might best achieve success in his present project by such honesty — feeling also, no doubt, the girl’s own strength in discovering truth and falsehood. ‘She’s her father’s own daughter,’ he said one day to Croll in Abchurch Lane; — for Croll, though he had left Melmotte’s employment when he found that his name had been forged, had now returned to the service of the daughter in some undefined position, and had been engaged to go with her and Madame Melmotte to New York.

‘Ah; yees,’ said Croll, ‘but bigger. He vas passionate⁴, and did lose his ‘ead; and vas blow’d up vid bigness.’ Whereupon Croll made an action as though he were a frog swelling⁵ himself to the dimensions of an ox. ‘‘E bursted himself, Mr Fisker. ‘E vas a great man; but the greater he grew he vas always less and less vise. ‘E ate so much that he became too fat to see to eat his vittels.’ It was thus that Herr Croll analysed the character of his late master. ‘But Ma’me’selle — ah, she is different. She vill never eat too moch, but vill see to eat alvays.’ Thus too he analysed the character of his young mistress.

At first things did not arrange themselves pleasantly between Madame Melmotte and Marie. The reader will perhaps remember that they were in no way connected by blood. Madame Melmotte was not Marie’s mother, nor, in the eye of the law, could Marie claim Melmotte as her father. She was alone in the world, absolutely without a relation, not knowing even what had been her mother’s name — not even knowing what was her father’s true name, as in the various biographies of the great man which were, as a matter of course, published within a fortnight of his death, various accounts were given as to his birth, parentage, and early history. The general opinion seemed to be that his father had been a

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