She hurried thence to the room occupied by the girl who was the cause of the mischief.

Roused suddenly by the voice of her mistress, she got up half awake, and sleepy-headed; and, assailed by a torrent of questions, answered so, in her confusion, as to give the initiative to others: before she was well awake, she had told all she had seen from the window, but nothing of what she had herself done.

Mrs.Wardour hurried to the kitchen, found the door on the latch, believed everything and much more, went straight to her son's room, and, in a calm rage, woke him up, and poured into his unwilling ears a torrent of mingled fact and fiction, wherein floated side by side with Letty's name every bad adjective she could bring the lips of propriety to utter.

Before he quite came to himself the news had well-nigh driven him mad.

There stood his mother, dashing her cold hailstorm of contemptuous wrath on the girl he loved, whom he had gone to bed believing the sweetest creature in creation, and loving himself more than she dared show! He had been dreaming of her with the utmost tenderness, when his mother woke him with the news that she had gone in the night with Tom Helmer, the poorest creature in the neighborhood.
"For God's sake, mother," he cried, "go away, and let me get up!" "What can you do, Godfrey?
What is there to be done?
Let the jade go to her ruin!" cried Mrs.Wardour, alarmed in the midst of her wrath.