rlook it.
Did you not tell me that Mr. Beaufort wrote to inform you of the abrupt
and intemperate visit of my brother--of his determination never to
forgive it? I think I remember something of this years ago."

"It is true!" said the guardian; "and the conduct of that brother is,
in fact, the true cause why you never ought to reassume your proper
name!--never to divulge it, even to the family with whom you connect
yourself by marriage; but, above all, to the Beauforts, who for that
cause, if that cause alone, would reject your suit."

The young man groaned--placed one hand before his eyes, and with the
other grasped his guardian's arm convulsively, as if to check him from
proceeding farther; but the good man, not divining his meaning, and
absorbed in his subject, went on, irritating the wound he had touched.

"Reflect!--your brother in boyhood--in the dying hours of his mother,
scarcely saved from the crime of a thief, flying from a friendly pursuit
with a notorious reprobate; afterwards implicated in some discreditable
transaction about a horse, rejecting all--every hand that could save
him, clinging by choice to the lowest companions and the meanest-habits,
disappearing from the country, and last seen, ten years ago--the beard
not yet on his chin--with that same reprobate of whom I have spoken, in
Paris; a day or so only before his companion, a coiner--a murderer--fell
by the hands of the police! You remember that when, in your seventeenth
year, you evinced some desire to retake your name--nay, even to re-find
that guilty brother--I placed before you, as a sad and terrible duty,
the newspaper that contained the particulars of the death and the
former adventures of that wretched accomplice, the notorious Gawtrey.
And,--telling you that Mr. Beaufort had long since written to inform me
that his own son and Lord Lilburne had seen your brother in company with
the miscreant just before his fate--nay, was, in all probability, the
very youth described in the account as found in his chamber and
escaping the pursuit--I asked you if you would now venture to leave that
disguise--that shelter under which you would for ever be safe from the
opprobrium of the world--from the shame that, sooner or later, your
brother must bring upon your name!"

"It is true--it is true!" said the pretended nephew, in a tone of great
anguish, and with trembling lips which the blood had forsaken. "Horrible
to look either to his past or his future! B