“I promised her, James, and I meant to keep my promise, but I know now that I have not done so. I did not grudge you money. I gave you more of what my father left me than I kept. But I did not try to be to you what I promised our mother to be. I know now, though I did not know it then. I have reason to know it now, for my little son Stanley looks up at me with your eyes to reproach me with it. What you once were he now is in looks and in disposition. I fear for him as your mother feared for you; and his mother knows now that the promise I made to your mother I did not keep. “James, if you have done evil I am greatly to blame. If I had kept my promise, if I had tried to take our dead mother’s place in your life, if I had aimed at being your companion, and at winning your confidence, if I had sought to keep evil influences away and to set good influences at work, you might never have formed the associations you have formed. That you have done the things they lay to your charge I cannot believe. I have seen the ‘Daily Record,’ and the portrait, and I know only too well, in spite of the disguise, that the James Mullen who is accused of being Captain Shannon is my half-brother James. I will never believe--nothing will make me believe--that it is really true, and that you are responsible for the inhuman crimes which you are said to have committed or to have caused to be committed. That you are associated with men who are capable of any wickedness is, I fear, only too true; men who, by flattering that fatal vanity of yours, which I know so well--that constitutional craving to be thought important and a power, of which I can see traces in the Manifesto which was published after the explosion--have made you their tool, and have persuaded you to accept responsibilities for actions in which you had no hand, I can readily believe. But that you, whom I have known to do such chivalrous actions, you whom I have seen empty your pockets to relieve some beggar whose woe-begone looks had appealed to your pity, could deliberately plan the murder of hundreds of inoffensive people, I cannot and never will believe. “Until I received your letter I did not know where to write to you, and I feared to send to the old address lest my note should fall into wrong hands. You say that you have got into a scrape, and that I must help you to get out of England, as you cannot trust your associates--which I can well believe. You say, too, that you must get right away to America or Australia, and that I must lend you the steam yacht, as it would not be safe to go by any ordinary passenger steamer, all of which are being watched. You say you would not drag me into such a miserable business if you could help it, but that you dare not risk the chance of attracting the attention in which your chartering yourself a boat big enough to cross to America might result.