ction with Sir Elkanah Crofton, and how unfortunately it was broken
off; but you cannot know the rest,--that is, you cannot know what we
alone know, and what is not so much as suspected by others; and of this
I can scarcely dare to speak, since it is essentially the secret of my
family."

I guessed at once to what she alluded; her troubled manner, her swimming
eyes, and her quivering voice, all betraying that she referred to the
mystery of her father's fate; while I doubted within myself whether
it were right and fitting for me to acknowledge that I knew the
secret soucre of her anxiety, she relieved me from my embarrassment by
continuing thus,--

"Your kind and generous friends have not suffered themselves to be
discouraged by defeat. They have again and again renewed their proposals
to my mother, only varying the mode, in the hope that by some stratagem
they might overcome her reasons for refusal. Now, though this rejection,
so persistent as it is, may seem ungracious, it is not without a fitting
and substantial cause."

Again she faltered, and grew confused, and now I saw how she struggled
between a natural reserve and an impulse to confide the soitow that
oppressed her to one who might befriend her.

"You may speak freely to me," said I, at last. "I am not ignorant of
the mystery you hint at. Crofton has told me what many surmise and some
freely believe in."

"But we know it,--know it for a certainty," cried she, clasping my hand
in her eagerness. "It is no longer a surmise or a suspicion. It is
a certainty,--a fact! Two letters in his handwriting have reached my
mother,--one from St. Louis, in America, where he had gone first; the
second from an Alpine village, where he was laid up in sickness. He had
had a terrible encounter with a man who had done him some gross wrong,
and he was wounded in the shoulder; after which he had to cross the
Rhine, wading or swimming, and travel many miles ere he could find
shelter. When he wrote, however, he was rapidly recovering, and as
quickly regaining all his old courage and daring."

"And from that time forward have you had no tidings of him?"

"Nothing but a check on a Russian banker in London to pay to my mother's
order a sum of money,--a considerable one, too; and although she hoped
to gain some clew to him through this, she could not succeed, nor have
we now any trace of him whatever. I ought to mention," said she, as
if catching up a forgotten thread in her narrativ