“Kate, hear me! I have not taken this step lightly, or without due consideration. I seek not to refer to the past, though that past is never absent from my memory; but you may imagine it cost me some resolution to come here to-day, when I tell you that I had rather have seen you lying dead before my eyes, feeling towards you as I felt one short year ago, than behold you surrounded by the luxuries of wealth--knowing as I do that you have obtained them by the sacrifice of all that is lovable in woman, by sinning against all your best and noblest impulses, by forfeiting all that renders life aught but one weary, endless round of cares and duties! To look on you as you are now--to read, as I can read, in every feature of your countenance, which, though a sealed book to others, I have studied too long not to decipher at a glance, traces of that desolation of heart which you have prepared for yourself--to see you thus, and to know that I am powerless to help you, and that you must sustain the burden of such an existence unaided, is to me bitter pain, and I have avoided this house as though it were plague-stricken. But as I sat through the long hours last night, striving to weigh dispassionately the past and the present, I arrived at the conclusion that even yet I owed you a duty, and I came here to-day actuated only by a desire to warn you, and to save you from a fate, to contemplate the mere possibility of which inspires me with horror. I came, regardless of my own feelings, forgetful of my wrongs, to do you a benefit; and now you close your soul against me, and receive me with hard words and cold looks! Kate, I have not deserved this at your hands!” “But, indeed--believe me you are mistaken,” replied Kate, eagerly; “I appreciate and thank you for the interest you still take in one who, as you truly say, has forfeited every claim on your regard; but your fears and suspicions are groundless--the intimate footing Mr. D’Almayne has attained in this house is merely a natural consequence of the trust Mr. Crane reposes in him. Why will you not believe the truth of what I tell you?” “Because it is impossible for me to do so without doubting the evidence of my own senses,” was the stern reply. “If you require any further reason for my scepticism it is this: I was in -------- Street, Pentonville, at two o’clock yesterday!”