cup of love to those
young lips only to nip it in the bud? The girl is not a stock or a
stone. You are a handsome man, Adrian, and the long and the short of
it is, those who play with fire must reap as they have sown."

Tanty, who had been holding forth with the rapidity of a loose
windmill in a hurricane, here found herself forced to pause and take
breath; which she did, fanning herself with much energy, a triumphant
consciousness of the unimpeachability of her logic written upon her
heated countenance. But Adrian still stared at her with the same
incredulous dismay; looking indeed as little like a gay Lothario as it
was possible, even for him.

"Do you mean," he said at last, in slow broken sentences, as his mind
wrestled with the strange tidings; "am I to understand that Molly,
that bright beautiful creature, has been made unhappy through me? Oh,
my dear Tanty," striving with a laugh, "the idea is too absurd, I am
old enough to be her father, you know--what evidence can you have for
a statement so distressing, so extraordinary."

"I am not quite in my dotage yet," quoth Tanty, drily; "neither am I
in the habit of making unfounded assertions, nephew. I have heard what
the girl has said with her own lips, I have read what she has written
in her diary; she has sobbed and cried over your cruelty in these very
arms--I don't know what further evidence----"

But Sir Adrian had started up again--"Molly crying, Molly crying for
me--God help us all--Cecile's child, whom I would give my life to keep
from trouble! Tanty, if this is true--it must be true since you say
so, I hardly know myself what I am saying--then I am to blame, deeply
to blame--and yet--I have not said one word to the child--did
nothing...." here he paused and a deep flush overspread his face to
the roots of his hair; "except indeed in the first moment of her
arrival--when she came in upon me as I was lost in memories of the
past--like the spirit of Cecile."

"Humph," said Tanty, pointedly, "but then you see what you took for
Cecile's spirit happened to be Molly in the flesh." She fixed her
sharp eyes upon her nephew, who, struck into confusion by her words,
seemed for the moment unable to answer. Then, as if satisfied with the
impression produced, she folded her hands over the umbrella handle and
observed in more placid tones than she had yet used:

"And now we must see what is to be done."

Adrian began to pace the room in greater perturbation.

"Wh