fronted by the dark and glowing countenance of
his cousin.

"I am not called upon," said he, "to go any further with you than this.
I have told you what no man till this hour has ever heard from my lips,
and it should serve to exonerate me from any unjust suspicions you may
have entertained. But to one of my temperament, secret scandal and the
gossip it engenders is only less painful than open notoriety. If I leave
the subject here, a thousand conjectures will at once seize upon you,
and my name if not hers will become, before I know it, the football of
gossip if not of worse and deeper suspicion than has yet assailed me.
Gentleman I take you to be honest men; husbands, perhaps, and fathers;
proud, too, in your way and jealous of your own reputation and that of
those with whom you are connected. If I succeed in convincing you that
my movements of late have been totally disconnected with the girl whose
cause you profess solely to be interested in, may I count upon your
silence as regards those actions and the real motive that led to them?"

"You may count upon my discretion as regards all matters that do not
come under the scope of police duty," returned Mr. Gryce. "I haven't
much time for gossip."

"And your man here?"

"O, he's safe where it profits him to be."

"Very well, then, I shall count upon you."

And with the knitted brows and clinched hands of a proudly reticent
man who, perhaps for the first time in his life finds himself forced to
reveal his inner nature to the world, he began his story in these words:

"Difficult as it is for me to introduce into a relation like this the
name of my father, I shall be obliged to do so in order to make my
conduct at a momentous crisis of my life intelligible to you. My father,
then, was a man of strong will and a few but determined prejudices.
Resolved that I should sustain the reputation of the family for wealth
and respectability, he gave me to understand from my earliest years,
that as long as I preserved my manhood from reproach, I had only to make
my wishes known, to have them immediately gratified; while if I crossed
his will either by indulging in dissipation or engaging in pursuits
unworthy of my name, I no longer need expect the favor of his
countenance or the assistance of his purse.

"When, therefore, at a certain period of my life, I found that the
charms of my cousin Evelyn were making rather too strong an impression
upon my fancy for a secured peace of