lemen, you have read the handwriting on the wall. Do you come
for defiance, or capitulation?"

General Laurance lifted his head, but instantly dropped it on his
bosom; he seemed to have aged suddenly, prematurely. Cuthbert
advanced, stood close beside the woman whose gaze intensified as he
drew near her, and said brokenly:

"Minnie, I come merely to exonerate myself before God and man. Heaven
is my witness, that I never knew I had a child in America until
to-night, that until to-night I believed you were in California
living as the wife of that base villain Peterson, who wrote
announcing himself your accepted lover. From the day I kissed you
good-bye at the cottage, I never received a line, a word, a message
from you. When I doubted my father's and Peterson's statements
concerning you, and wrote two letters, one to the President of the
college, one to a resident professor, seeking some information of
your whereabouts, in order at least to visit you once more, when I
became twenty-one, both answered me that you had forfeited your fair
name, had been forsaken by your grandmother, and had gone away from
the village accompanied by Peterson, who was regarded as your
favoured lover. I ceased to doubt, I believed you false. I knew no
better until to-night. Father, my honour demands that the truth be
spoken at last. Will you corroborate my statement?"

Pale and proud, he stood erect, and she saw that a consciousness of
rectitude at least in purpose, sustained him.

"Mrs. Orme----" began General Laurance.

"Away with such shams and masks! Mrs. Orme died on the theatrical
boards to-night, and henceforth the world knows me as Minnie
Laurance! Ah! by the grace of God! Minnie Laurance!"

She laughed derisively, and held up her fair slender hand, exhibiting
the black agate with its grinning skull lighted by the glow of the
large radiant diamonds.

"Minnie, I never dreamed you were his wife; oh, my God! how horrible
it all is!"

He seemed bewildered, and his son exclaimed:

"Who is responsible for the separation from my wife? You, father, or
I?"

"I did it, my son. I meant it for the best. I naturally believed you
had been entrapped into a shameful alliance, and as any other father
would have done, I was ready to credit the unfavourable estimate
derived from the man Peterson. He told me that Minnie had belonged to
him until she and her grandmother conceived the scheme of inveigling
you into a secret marriage; and afterwa