"To marry her," repeated Mr. Gordon. "She is not a married woman, and her real name need not be divulged. When you hear the story I am about to relate, when you hear the conditions, the only conditions, on which I will consent to lift her from the degrading depths into which she has fallen, you will understand why I desire your assistance. You will be able to make clear to her the effect of her consent or refusal upon her destiny and the destiny of her child; you will be able to use arguments which are in my mind, but to which I shall not give utterance. And remember, through all, that her child is a child of shame, and that I hold out to her the only prospect of that child being brought up in a reputable way and of herself being raised to respectability." He paused a moment or two before he opened fresh matter. "I was a poor lad, Dr. Spenlove, without parents, without a home, and when I was fourteen years of age I was working as an errand boy in London, and keeping myself upon a wage of four shillings a week. I lost this situation through the bankruptcy of my employer, and I was not successful in obtaining another. One day I saw on the walls a bill of a vessel going to Australia, and I applied at the agent's office with a vague idea that I might obtain a passage by working aboard ship in some capacity or other. I was a strong boy--starvation agrees with some lads--and a willing boy, and it happened that one of my stamp was wanted in the cook's galley. I was engaged at a shilling a month, and I landed in Melbourne with four shillings in my pocket. "How I lived till I became a man is neither here nor there, but when gold was discovered I lived well, for I got enough to buy a share in a cattle station, which now belongs entirely to me. In 1860, being then on the highroad to fortune, I made the acquaintance of a man whom I will call Mr. Charles, and of his only child, a girl of fourteen, whom I will call Mary. I was taken with Mr. Charles, and I was taken in by him as well, for he disappeared from the colony a couple of years afterward in my debt to the tune of two thousand pounds. He had the grace to write to me from London, saying he would pay me some day, and there the matter rested for seven years more, which brings me to two years ago.