ng had been so successful, it might
have tempted you to another of the same kind."

"Oh, Betsy is my daughter, and an ungrateful one she is. We met with
Phillips in Melbourne, just when we came first to Port Philip. Peck had
run through the 1,500 pounds that we got from Cross Hall, and we was
hard up and obliged to leave Sydney under a cloud; but Peck, he said,
such a handsome face as she had should be a fortune to us. It's been a
fortune to herself; but as for me, she never thinks of me. And there's
Frank, when I wrote to him after I had read in an old newspaper at the
diggings that he had come into the estate, and asked him for a little
help, he never condescended to send me an answer or to take the least
notice of me that has done so much for him. If it had not been for me,
where would he have been now? His mother was a poor woman. If you'd
seen the poor old nightgown I took off of him--and there has he been
educated like a gentleman, and getting Cross Hall, and being a member
of Parliament too, and never to take trouble to write me a line or to
send me a penny. I said I'd be revenged on him, and so I shall."

"Well, Mrs. Peck," said Brandon, "I will just write down the
particulars of this curious story, and you will sign it if you think I
have put them down correctly." So with clearness and brevity Brandon
sketched the facts, if facts they were, which Mrs. Peck had narrated,
and then he read what he had written.

"I don't see as there's any call to put in all about how I got Harry
Hogarth to marry me; that has nothing to do with the case in hand,"
said Mrs. Peck.

"I think," said Brandon, "that if the young man is to lose the property
through this confession, he has a right to know what sort of mother he
loses with it. I think you had better sign this as it stands. I have
signed something for you, and you must do the same for me."

Mrs. Peck signed her name rather reluctantly as Elizabeth Hogarth,
known as Elizabeth Peck, and was proceeding to give some account of her
relations with Peck, of rather a romantic character. Perhaps, after so
long a stretch of trying to tell the truth, she needed some relief to
her imagination; but Brandon soon stopped these revelations, and sent
her thoughts in quite another channel.

"Now," said he, "I believe this to be a true statement--a perfectly
true statement--but it is of no use whatever to be used against Mr.
Hogarth. The property was left to him by will, as distinctly as