Mr. Lupton here covered his eyes with his hand. In a few minutes he thus continued,--“From that moment I foresaw that, sooner or later, you must know all. _Now_ you do know all; and that knowledge has come to you in such a shape, as to render any farther allusion to it needless. The subject is at best a painful one to us both, but most especially so to me; although I once held such things lightly, and as matter for pleasantry and joke. I now acknowledge you as my son; and I confess that a proud, though painful, time it is, now I can do so face to face. Save in yours and my own, the blood of an ancient and honourable family runs in no human veins. You are grown to manhood, and the circumstances which Providence has brought about enable me to address you thus without impropriety. But you must be told, my boy, that I was the last, the very last of all my race. My father knew it; he lamented over it; but he cherished and guarded me because of it, as though the world contained for him no other treasure. _I_ knew it too; I grew up, as I may say, side by side with that fatal knowledge. With our ideas of long descents, and ancient honourable lines, it is the bitterest thought in a man's breast to think that here the stream must stop; that in this one body it is lost, and the sun shall shine upon its name no longer. Anxiety for my life and welfare helped to bring my father to the grave earlier than otherwise nature would have called him, and he died while yet I was very young. But before he died he bound me, on attaining my twenty-first year, to marry one of the members of an opulent and numerous family, which had long enjoyed his esteem. I did so, and the lady he had selected became my wife. There were circumstances between Mrs. Lupton and myself which need not be explained, but which, while they made her deem herself most unhappy in her fate, left me not a whit less so in opinion of mine. It is sufficient that I say, years passed on, and I was still the last. Beyond this I need not go. In you, my boy, in you--but no, that need not to be said, either. Only this I will and must say, that, under circumstances which the world superficially may deem highly criminal, there may be hidden causes, and feelings, and springs of action, which no heart knows but his that contains them, and which, through the force of perhaps erroneous notions and education from our youth, have become individually equally strong with right principles, and may therefore possibly be in some sort received in palliation.”