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 narrative, “that in his last letter he enjoined my mother not to receive any payment from the assurance company, nor enter into any compromise with them; and, above all, to live in the hope that we should meet again and be happy.” “And are you still ignorant of where he now is?” “We only know that a cousin of mine, an officer of engineers at Aden, heard of an Englishman being engaged by the Shah of Persia to report on certain silver mines at Kashan, and from all he could learn, the description would apply to him. My cousin had obtained leave of absence expressly to trace him, and promised in his last letter to bring me himself any tidings he might procure here to Malta. Indeed, when I learned that a stranger had asked to see me, I was full sure it was my cousin Harry.”