n before he could say a word:

"The scrape affects your young lady, and goes back to the period of a
transaction in which her late father was engaged, doesn't it?"

He nods, and I cut in once more:

"There is a party, who turned up after seeing the announcement of your
marriage in the paper, who is cognizant of what he oughtn't to know, and
who is prepared to use his knowledge of the same to the prejudice of the
young lady and of your marriage, unless he receives a sum of money to
quiet him? Very well. Now, first of all, Mr. Frank, state what you have
been told by the young lady herself about the transaction of her late
father. How did you first come to have any knowledge of it?"

"She was talking to me about her father one day so tenderly and prettily,
that she quite excited my interest about him," begins Mr. Frank; "and I
asked her, among other things, what had occasioned his death. She said she
believed it was distress of mind in the first instance; and added that
this distress was connected with a shocking secret, which she and her
mother had kept from everybody, but which she could not keep from me,
because she was determined to begin her married life by having no secrets
from her husband."

Here Mr. Frank began to get sentimental again, and I pulled him up short
once more with the paper-knife.

"She told me," Mr. Frank went on, "that the great mistake of her father's
life was his selling out of the army and taking to the wine-trade. He had
no talent for business; things went wrong with him from the first. His
clerk, it was strongly suspected, cheated him----"

"Stop a bit," says I. "What was that suspected clerk's name?"

"Davager," says he.

"Davager," says I, making a note of it. "Go on, Mr. Frank."

"His affairs got more and more entangled," says Mr. Frank; "he was pressed
for money in all directions; bankruptcy, and consequent dishonor (as he
considered it), stared him in the face. His mind was so affected by his
troubles that both his wife and daughter, toward the last, considered him
to be hardly responsible for his own acts. In this state of desperation
and misery, he----" Here Mr. Frank began to hesitate.

We have two ways in the law of drawing evidence off nice and clear from an
unwilling client or witness. We give him a fright, or we treat him to a
joke. I treated Mr. Frank to a joke.

"Ah!" says I, "I know what he did. He had a signature to write; and, by
the most natural mistake in the wor