e are threatened with an exposure, if you don't
acknowledge her. Wait a minute! Have you any evidence against her,
besides your own?"

"I have a letter, a long letter from her accomplice, containing a
confession of his guilt and hers."

"She is sure to call that confession a conspiracy. It's of no use to us,
unless we dared to go to law--and we daren't. We must hush the thing up
at any price; or it will be the death of my father. This is a case for
money, just as I thought it would be. Mr. and Miss Shopkeeper have got
a large assortment of silence to sell; and we must buy it of them, over
the domestic counter, at so much a yard. Have you been there yet, Basil,
to ask the price and strike the bargain?"

"I was at the house, yesterday."

"The deuce you were! And who did you see?--The father? Did you bring him
to terms? did you do business with Mr. Shopkeeper?"

"His manner was brutal: his language, the language of a bully--?"

"So much the better. Those men are easiest dealt with: if he will only
fly into a passion with me, I engage for success beforehand. But the
end--how did it end?"

"As it began:--in threats on his part, in endurance on mine."

"Ah! we'll see how he likes my endurance next: he'll find it rather a
different sort of endurance from yours. By-the-bye, Basil, what money
had you to offer him?"

"I made no offer to him then. Circumstances happened which rendered me
incapable of thinking of it. I intended to go there again, to-day; and
if money would bribe him to silence, and save my family from sharing the
dishonour which has fallen on _me,_ to abandon to him the only money I
have of my own--the little income left me by our mother."

"Do you mean to say that your only resource is in that wretched trifle,
and that you ever really intend to let it go, and start in the world
without a rap? Do you mean to say that my father gave you up without
making the smallest provision for you, in such a mess as your's? Hang
it! do him justice. He has been hard enough on you, I know; but he can't
have coolly turned you over to ruin in that way."

"He offered me money, at parting; but with such words of contempt and
insult that I would have died rather than take it. I told him that,
unaided by his purse, I would preserve him, and preserve his family from
the infamous consequences of my calamity--though I sacrificed my own
happiness and my own honour for ever in doing it. And I go to-day to
make that sacrifice. Th