I find now, that it is too late, that there is no wisdom in haste. It weighed heavily upon me, as a duty not to be avoided, to endeavour to ascertain whether my father arrived in the Germanic, and after that what had become of him. And with the consciousness of this unmistakable duty arose the memory of so many acts of tenderness and kindness from my father to myself, that I began to accuse myself of injustice towards him, and to believe that it was not he who had wronged me, but I who had wronged him. With this grievous thought in my mind, I left you, and proceeded to Liverpool. My first visit was paid to the office of the White Star Line. There I learned that my father had taken passage in New York on the date I gave, that the Germanic arrived in Liverpool after a rapid passage of little more than eight days, that no casualty occurred on the voyage, and that there was no doubt that my father landed with the other passengers. This point was settled by the books of the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. My father had stopped there for six days, and his name was duly recorded. Another point, quite as important, was established by reference to the hotel books and by inquiring of persons employed in the hotel. When my father left Liverpool, he took train to London. I had arrived at this stage of my inquiries, and was debating on the next step to take, when my attention was attracted by the cries of the newspaper street boys, calling out at the top of their voices, fresh discoveries in the _Evening Moon_ respecting the murder in Great Porter Square. With no suspicion of the awful disclosure which awaited me, but naturally interested in any new phase of the mysterious incident, I purchased the paper and looked at the headings of the Supplement, and, casually at the matter. Seeing my own name--the name of Holdfast--repeated over and over again in the paper, I hurried from the street to the solitude of my room, and there read the most wicked, monstrous, and lying romance that human minds ever invented. And in addition to the horrible calumnies which that "Romance of Real Life" contains in its references to me, I learned, to my unutterable grief, that the man who was so foully murdered in Great Porter Square was my own father.