d swear it to you, Elizabeth--I was not to blame. Can
you believe my word?"

"I can, I do."

"God bless you for saying so, my love--the one love of my
life--Elizabeth! Forgive me: I will not say it again. To add to my
troubles, then, I found reason to believe that I had no right to the
name I bore, that I was of a different family, a different race,
altogether; that it would simplify the disposal of certain property if I
were dead; and so--I died. I disappeared. I can never again take the
name that once was mine."

He said all this, but no suspicion of the truth crossed Elizabeth's
mind. That she was the person who had benefited by his disappearance was
as far from her thoughts as from Brian's at that moment. That he was the
Brian Luttrell of whom she had so often heard, whose death in the Alps
had seemed so certain that even the law courts had been satisfied that
she might rightfully inherit his possessions, that he--John Stretton,
the boys' tutor--could be this dead cousin of her's, was too incredible
a thought ever to occur to her. She felt nothing but sorrow for his past
troubles, and a conviction that he was perfectly in the right.

"But you are deceiving your friends," she said.

"For their good, as I firmly believe," answered Brian, sorrowfully. "If
I went back to them, I should cause a great deal of confusion and
distress: I should make my so-called heirs uncomfortable and unhappy,
and, as far as I can see, I should have no right to the property that
they would not consent to retain if I were living."

"Yes--if I am dead, and if no one else appears to claim it. It is a
complicated business, and one that would take some time to explain. Let
it suffice that I was utterly hopeless, utterly miserable, when I cast
away what had always seemed to me to be my birthright; that I was then
for many months very ill; and that, when you met me in Italy, I was just
winning my way back to health, and repose of mind and body. And then--do
you remember how you looked and spoke to me? Of course, you do not know.
You were good, and sweet, and kind: you stretched out your hand to aid a
fallen man, for I was poorer and more friendless than you knew; and from
the moment when you said you trusted me, as we sat together on the bench
upon the cliffs my whole soul went out to you, Elizabeth, and I loved
you as I never had loved before--as I never shall love again."

"In time," she murmured, "you will learn to care for someone else,