"I will tell you all from the beginning. A hidden sin is, as you say, heavy enough to crush a man into hell. But I will make no more preface. Sir, I had the misfortune to lose a very noble mother when I was young. When I was ten years old, and my brother (I have one brother) was eight, our mother died! We were but children, you will say; but I don't, even now that I am a dying, sinful old man, forget my mother. She taught us to pray and to shun sin. She also surrounded us with such high and holy thoughts--she so gave us the perfection of all pure mother love, that we must have been less than human not to be good boys during her lifetime. I remember even now the look in her eyes when I refused on any childish occasion to follow the good, and then chose the evil. I have a daughter--one beloved daughter, something like my mother. I have seen the same high and honorable light in her eyes, but never since in any others. Well, my mother died, and Jasper and I had only her memory to keep us right. We used to talk about her often, and often fretted for her as, I suppose, few little boys before or since have fretted for a mother. After her death we were sent to school. Our father even then was a rich man: he was a self-made man; he started a business in a small way in the City, but small beginnings often make great endings, and the little business grew, and grew, and success and wealth came almost without effort. Jasper and I never knew what poverty meant. I loved learning better than my brother did, and at the age of eighteen, when Jasper went into our father's business, I was sent to Oxford. At twenty-two I had taken my degree, and done so, not perhaps brilliantly, but with some honor. Any profession was now open to me, and my father gave me full permission to choose any walk in life I chose; at the same time he made a proposal. He was no longer so young as he had been; he had made his fortune; he believed that Jasper's aptitude for business excelled his own. If we would become partners in the firm which he had made, and which was already rising into considerable eminence, he would retire altogether. We young men should work the business in our own way. He was confident we should rise to immense wealth. While making this proposal our father said that he would not give up his business to Jasper alone. If both his sons accepted it, then he would be willing to retire, taking with him a considerable sum of money, but still leaving affairs both unencumbered and flourishing. 'You are my heirs eventually.' he said to us both; 'and now I give you a week to decide.' At the end of the allotted time we accepted the offer. This was principally Jasper's doing, for at that time I knew nothing of business, and had thought of a profession. Afterwards I liked the counting-house, and became as absorbed as others in the all-engrossing accumulation of wealth. Our father had taken a very large sum of money out of the