“My own shadow,” continued the girl--“and I have no choice but to admit it. If I dare to claim that it no longer represents me, there are my footsteps among the others reaching to this very moment to give me the lie. I am what I am, not through any independent purpose of my own, but because, in common with the common impostors on that long journey, I have found my soul in the heaven of chivalry which it revealed to me. I ask you only in charity to believe the word of an adventuress that, during all these months of my redemption, my punishment has most lain in my own shameful consciousness of the lie I had doomed myself to live. To have been honoured by you, to have shared your confidence, to have acquiesced in moral condemnations, and to have known all the time that I was utterly unworthy of your trust--more guileful than the pretenders I helped to expose.” Her voice faltered and ceased, and for a while there ensued a profound silence. But in a little she took up again, with a scarce audible sigh, the burden of her confession:-- “I ask you to believe that, and I ask you to believe that I am even less wretched in my voluntary self-exposure than I have long been in my deceit. I have learned to value the truth, and I can speak it at last. “Mr Balm, at the time when you engaged my brother, giving him the chance of his life, we had both long been orphans. We lived together, and I was wholly dependent on him. He had been educated to the law, and was a man of brilliant, if undisciplined, talents. He was ambitious for us both; and with both of us, I think, imagination was wont to run ahead of discretion. Unfortunately for him the morale of the firm by whom he was employed, and to whom he acted as head conveyancing clerk, was none of the best. It confessed itself in speculative enterprises, which ultimately led to the collapse and bankruptcy of Broker & Borrodaile. My brother, though morally innocent, suffered through the disrepute which the firm in its transactions had brought upon itself. He found it difficult to obtain a new situation, and before very long we were in a desperate state. It was then that Mr Plover--who had always believed in Herbert and sympathised with our misfortunes--came to our assistance, and was the means of procuring my brother a post such as he had never dreamed of possessing.