tlemen at
dis onhappy season," he rejoined. "Wen de brain is all right
again"--tapping his own forehead--"your guardian will conduct the
faithful knight to kneel at de feet of her he loves so well."

"And the other--where is he?" fell involuntarily from my lips--my
heaving heart--an inquiry that I regretted as soon as it was uttered;
for, affecting sorrowful mystery, the man inclined himself toward me and
whispered in my ear confidentially:

"Plighted to another, and gone where no eyes of yours shall rest on him
again."

"Pander--liar--spy!" burst from my passionate lips as in all the fury of
desperation I turned from the creature who had so wantonly wounded my
self-respect, and waved to him to begone. Another name quivered on my
lips, but I checked it on their threshold after that first burst of
indignation instantly subdued.

I was not brave enough nor strong enough to hazard a shaft like that
which might have been returned to me so deathfully. I would let the
barrier stand which he had erected between us, and which to demolish
would be to lay myself open, perhaps, to insult of the darkest
description.

Let the ostrich with his head in the sand still imagine himself unseen;
the masquerader still conceive himself secure beneath his paper
travesty; the serpent still coil apparently unrecognized beside the
bare, gray stone that reveals him to the eye--I was too cowardly, too
feeble, to cope with strategy and double-dyed duplicity like this!

So the man went his way with his silly secret undiscovered, as he
deemed, and that it might remain so to the end, as far as he could know,
I devoutly prayed. For I knew of old the unscrupulous lengths to which,
when nerved by hate or disappointment or passions of any kind, he could
go, without a particle of mercy for his victims or remorse for his
ill-doing.

When Dr. Englehart was gone--for so I still choose to call him for some
reasons, although I give my reader credit for still more astuteness than
I possessed myself, and believe that he has long ago recognized, through
this cloud of mystery and travesty thrown about him, an old
acquaintance--the child Ernie rose from the bed on which he had lain
tremulous and observant, with his small hands clinched, his eyes on
fire. "Ernie kill bad man!" he exclaimed, ferociously, "for trouble
missy. Give Ernie letter--he carry it away and hide it; bad letter--make
poor Mirry cry."

"No, Ernie, I will keep it," I said, as I laid it c