"I would rather," he moaned, when his mind became more orderly, "carry the hump upon the withered, distorted legs of that man, Oscar Leigh, than a bend sinister. A noble woman may fall, but no noble woman who has fallen would take money for her sin. It is not the sin that would hurt me, but the hire of the sin, the notion that I had the blood of shame in my veins, and the price of shame in my pocket. Bah! I would die of fever if it were so. My blood, the blood in my veins would ferment and stew my flesh. I should rot from within." He dropped his arm and looked around him. The sight of the familiar room and well-known objects allayed the agony of despair. He drew a deep breath and sat up. "I have been terrifying myself with shadows, with less than shadows, with absolute blanks; nay, I have been terrifying myself with less than nothing! I have been trying to change the absolute and manifest, and vouched sunlight into gloom and the people of gloom, phantoms. The only evidence before me is evidence against my fears. Instead of an intangible horror, there is an affirmed and ponderable assurance that although my name is Hanbury, and I got that name from Sir Hanbury Williams, not a drop of his blood is in my veins! Why, I am more like a girl with her first love-letter, trying to guess its contents from the outside, than a man with a business document in his hand! Let me read this thing through now as I discussed another matter awhile ago, as if it were a brief put into my hands as a counsel. It is exactly, or almost exactly like a brief." He tossed the sheets carelessly in his hand. "Let us see what the case is." He sat himself back deliberately in his chair, thrust out his legs before him, and holding the manuscript in both hands began it again. With contracted brows and face of stern attention he read on. He betrayed no more excitement than if he held in his hand a bluebook which he desired to master for some routine speech. Now and then he cleared his throat softly, imperfectly, indifferent to the result; for all other sound he made he might have been fashioned of marble. Now and then he turned the leaves and moved slightly from side to side; for all other motion he made he might have been dead. At last he came to the final line, to his father's signature. He read all and then allowing the manuscript to fall from his hands and his arms to drop to his side, sat in the chair motionless, staring into vacancy. For an hour he remained thus. Beyond the heaving of his chest and his calm regular respiration, he was perfectly still. At length he sighed profoundly, not from sadness, but deep musing, shook himself, shuddered, looked round him as though he had just waked from sleeping in a strange place. He rose slowly and going to the window drew up the blind. No lights were now to be seen in the rear of any of the houses, and complete silence filled the windless air.