es not of an
ordinary kind--what circumstances you have no claim to know. _That_ part
of my life is my secret and my wife's, and belongs to us alone.

"I have now dwelt long enough for your information on my own guilty
share in the events of the Past. As to the Present and the Future, I
have still a word or two left to say.

"You have declared that I shall expiate, by the exposure of my shameful
secret before all my friends, the wrong your sister suffered at my
hands. My life has been one long expiation for that wrong. My broken
health, my altered character, my weary secret sorrows, unpartaken and
unconsoled, have punished me for many years past more heavily than you
think. Do you desire to see me visited by more poignant sufferings
than these? If it be so, you may enjoy the vindictive triumph of having
already inflicted them. Your threats will force me, in a few hours, from
the friends I have lived with, at the very time when the affection shown
to me, and the honor conferred on me by those friends, have made their
society most precious to my heart. You force me from this, and from
more--for you force me from my home, at the moment when my son has
affectionately entreated me to take him back to my fireside.

"These trials, heavy as they are, I am ready to endure, if, by accepting
them humbly, I may be deemed to have made some atonement for my sin. But
more I have not the fortitude to meet. I cannot face the exposure with
which you are resolved to overwhelm me. The anxiety--perhaps, I ought to
say, the weakness--of my life, has been to win and keep the respect
of others. You are about, by disclosing the crime which dishonored
my youth, to deprive me of my good fame. I can let it go without a
struggle, as part of the punishment that I have deserved; but I have not
the courage to wait and see you take it from me. My own sensations tell
me that I have not long to live; my own convictions assure me that
I cannot fitly prepare myself for death, until I am far removed from
worldly interests and worldly terrors--in a word, from the horror of an
exposure, which I have deserved, but which, at the end of my weary life,
is more than I can endure. We have seen the last of each other in this
world. To-night I shall be beyond the reach of your retaliation;
for to-night I shall be journeying to the retreat in which the short
remainder of my life will be hidden from you and from all men.

"It now only remains for me to advert to the