own heart shall not accuse me of cowardice." There were three facts confronting this young woman, and one seemed nearly as terrible as the other. First, her father was guilty. During almost all the years of her life he had been not an honorable, but a base man; he had, to enrich himself, robbed the widow and the fatherless; he had grown wealthy on their poverty; he had left them to suffer, perhaps to die. The will which he had thought would never be read was there to prove his treachery. Believing that his fellow-trustee was dead, he had betrayed his sacred trust. Charlotte could scarcely imagine a darker crime. Her father, who looked so noble, who was so tender and good to her, who bore so high a character in the eyes of the world, was a very bad man. This was her first fact. Her second seemed, just because of the first, even a shade darker. This father, whom she had loved, this poor, broken-down, guilty father, who, like a broken idol, had fallen from his high estate in her heart, was _dying_. Ah! she knew it now; that look on his old face could only belong to the dying. How blind she had been! how ignorant! But the Wrights' words had torn the veil from her eyes; the guilty man was going fast to judgment. The God whom he had sinned against was about to demand retribution. Now she read the key to his unhappiness, his despair. No wonder, no wonder, that like a canker it had eaten into his heart. Her father was certainly dying; God himself was taking his punishment into His own hands. Charlotte's third fact, though the most absolutely personal of the whole, scarcely tortured her as the other two did to-night. It lay so clearly and so directly in her path, that there was no pausing how best to act. The way for action was too clear to be even for an instant disobeyed. Into this fire she must walk without hesitation or pause. Her wedding-day could not be on the twentieth; her engagement must be broken off; her marriage at an end. What! she, the daughter of a thief, ally herself to an upright, honorable man! Never! never! Whatever the consequences and the pain to either, Hinton and she must part. She did not yet know how this parting would be effected. She did not know whether she would say farewell to her lover telling him all the terrible and bitter disgrace, or with a poor and lame excuse on her lips. But however she did it, the thing must be done. Never, never, never would she drag the man she loved down into her depths of shame.