"Stand where you are. Do not move another step towards me." We stood, gazing upon each other in silence for a minute or two. Then I said, "You have not slept, sir." "I have not slept. When I left Mrs. Holdfast last night, I came to my study, and have been here all the night, waiting for daylight--and you." "You have heard bad news, sir," I said. "I have heard what I would have given my fortune and my life had never been spoken. It is incredible that one whom I loved should bring dishonour upon my name and shame into my house!" Here I must pause for a moment or two. When I commenced this statement I had no idea that it would stretch out to its present length, and so anxious am I that it should reach you as early as possible that I will shorten the description of what remains to be told. Prepare to be shocked and amazed--as I myself was shocked and amazed at the revelation made to me that morning in my father's study, on that last morning I ever spent in his house. You think you know the character of this woman who plays with men's lives and honour as though they were toys to amuse an idle hour. You do not yet comprehend the depths of infamy to which such a nature as hers can descend. Nor did I until I left my father's house, never to return. She had, as she declared she would, made a confession to my father during the night; it was not a confession of her own shameful life, but an invention so horrible as almost, at the time I heard it, to deprive me of the power of speech. She accused me of playing the lover to her; she described me as a profligate of the vilest kind. She made my father believe that from the moment I saw her I filled her ears with protestations and proposals which I should be ashamed to repeat to one as pure and innocent as yourself. Day after day, hour after hour, she had followed out the plan she had devised to shut me from my father's heart and deprive me of his love, and so skilfully and artfully were all the details guided by her wicked mind that, presented as they were to my father with tears, and sobs, and tremblings, he could scarcely avoid believing in their truth. Twice on the previous day--so her story ran--had I forced myself into her private room; once in the morning when my father was in his city office, and again in the night when she was about to retire to rest, and when I knew that my father was not in the house. Unfortunately, as she said, for she would have preferred that a scandal so shameful should have no chance of becoming public, her maid entered the room on both occasions, and witnessed portions of the scenes. In the morning, when her maid intruded herself, she had dismissed her, and thereafter implored me to leave her in peace. In the evening I was so violent that she had to seek protection from her maid. She called the maid, who corroborated her in every particular; and she produced other evidence against me in the shape of the locket I had worn on my chain.