ly in your confidence."

"Yes, Lucy, I know you never did; but that is a prejudice you inherited
from your mother."

"I appeal to your own conscience, sir, whether mamma's prejudice against
them was not just and well founded. Yet it was not so much prejudice as
the antipathy which good bears to evil, honesty to fraud, and truth
to darkness, dissimulation, and falsehood. I entreat you, then, to
investigate this matter, papa; for as sure as I have life, so certainly
was my dear brother removed, in order, at the proper time, to make
way for this impostor. You know not, sir, but there may be a base and
inhuman murder involved in this matter--nay, a double murder--that of
my cousin, too; yes, and the worst of all murders, the murder of the
innocent and defenceless. As a man, as a magistrate, but, above all,
a thousand times, as a father--as the father and uncle of the very two
children that have disappeared, it becomes your duty to examine into
this dark business thoroughly."

"I have no reason to suspect the Corbets, Lucy. I have ever found them
faithful to me and to my interests."

"I know, sir, you have ever found them obsequious and slavish and ready
to abet you in many acts which I regret that you ever committed. There
is the case of that unfortunate man, Trailcudgel, and many similar ones;
were they not as active and cheerful! in bearing out your very harsh
orders against him and others of your tenantry, as if they I had been
advancing the cause of humanity?"

"Say the cause of justice, if you please, Lucy--the rights of a
landlord."

"But, papa, if the unfortunate tenantry by whose toil and labor we live
in affluence and; luxury do not find a friend in their landlord, who is,
by his relation to them, their natural protector, to whom else in the
wide world can they turn? This, however, is not the subject on which I
wish to speak. I do believe that Thomas Corbet is deep, designing, and
vindictive. He was always a close, dark man, without either cheerfulness
or candor. Beware, therefore, of him and of his family. Nay, he has a
capacity for being dangerous; for it strikes me, sir, that his intellect
is as far above his position in life as his principles are beneath it."

There was much in what Lucy said that forced itself upon her father's
reflection, much that startled him, and a good deal that gave him pain.
He paused for a considerable time after she had ceased to speak, and
said,

"I will think of these matt