dy to
save your life by the sacrifice of all that has made hers dear."

"Curse him! I'd take my oath you're right!" he asseverated. "He's sly
enough and vile enough for anything."

"Did you ever see Harvey Farnham?" I questioned.

"Yes, years ago I knew him well, and liked him immensely--as he did me,
I think. It was in Tuolumne County, California, where he had a gold
mine--the Miss Cunningham. It was I who named that, oddly enough it may
seem to you, after my sister, of course. He wasn't aware of that, but
thought it was just a whim of mine, that probably I'd admired some girl
called 'Miss Cunningham,' and wanted to pay her a compliment. You see,
no one knew me by my right name even then.

"It was before that hateful time when I got in with Collins, or Wildred,
whichever you like to call him, and not long after I'd run away from
home and England under the assumed name of Hartley--it was my mother's
maiden name. I was only seventeen or eighteen, but I was pretty sharp
for my years, I'm afraid, for I'd been among a queer lot already, and
one night I would have got into a row with some older man over cards, a
row that might have ended badly if it hadn't been for Mr. Farnham, who
had dropped into the place to look on, and who stood by me for all he
was worth.

"It seemed he noticed me the moment he entered the room, thinking that I
looked enough like him to be his own son. Afterward he took me up,
making a lot of me, wanting to find out where I'd come from, and all
that. He thought my resemblance to him (which everyone who saw us
together invariably remarked) a wonderful joke, and used to call me his
'boy,' and 'sonny,' getting it into his head that I was a sort of
'Mascot,' who brought luck to him in whatever he undertook. That was the
principal reason, of course, that he was so keen on having me name his
mine for him. I think if I had sowed all my wild oats, and been willing
to settle down a bit into a respectable member of society, there was a
time when he wouldn't have minded adopting me, for some old, unhappy
love affair or other had kept him out of the marriage-market, eligible
as he was, and he swore that he never meant to marry, even for the hope
of having an heir to all his money. Yes, I might have been that heir if
I hadn't been a fool, for Farnham certainly thought the world and all of
me in those days. As it was, he did me many a kindness."

"And now, by way of repaying that affection and those kindnesses