"Have I told you that the man who had been my tutor as a boy and youth, who had accompanied me on my foreign travels, had remained all these years an inmate of my mother's house, partly to guide the studies of the maid, Esmeralda, whom my mother intended for a companion, and perchance a nurse, and partly as my mother's secretary and business manager--for my mother's estate, so frugally did she live, and so jealously did she guard her store, had grown to no mean dimensions? This man, this viper I should rather call him, had wormed himself into my confidence. I regarded him as a friend. It was not so much that I confided to him my love for Esmeralda as that he divined it--the wonder is that my mother had not herself divined it. When I spoke to him of my fixed resolve to make Esmeralda my wife he professed the utmost alarm if my mother should become aware of my infatuation, as he termed it. He affected to dissuade me from my purpose, and when he found that I laughed his warnings to the wind he counselled me to a secret marriage--anything rather than tell my mother, though I am persuaded that had I but been frank and firm my mother's love would in the end have proved stronger than her pride and she would have blessed our union. But, I yielded to the insidious advice of the tempter the more readily, doubtless, that I saw therein the means of gratifying my love and avoiding a rupture with a parent who, by a stroke of the pen, could leave me penniless save for the meagre pittance of a curate. "Let me hasten to the end. My tutor secured a charming cottage in the neighbourhood of Grasmere. My mother had gone to Matlock for a three months' cure. Esmeralda and I journeyed by coach to Gretna Green, and there were made man and wife. Look in that box, and you will find a copy of the certificate of our marriage." I found the document--I found other things as well that made me catch my breath, but of these anon. It was a certificate of what used to be called a "red-hot wedding," welded on the anvil for an altar. It ran: "KINGDOM OF SCOTLAND. "PARISH OF GRETNA. "THESE ARE TO CERTIFY TO ALL WHOM IT MAY CONCERN that James Garside, of the City of Manchester, in the County of Lancaster, Clerk in Holy Orders, and Esmeralda Atkinson, of the same city, Spinster, being now both here present, and having declared to me that they are single persons, have now been married after the manner of the laws of Scotland. As witness our hands at Gretna the 13th day of April, 1812. "Witnesses: CALEB OSMALSTONE. DOUGLAS FEATHERSTONE." "Atkinson," I repeated, inquiringly.