“Did she want me to sacrifice my prospects? Oh no, no! Did she want to be acknowledged before the world as my wife? No, a thousand times. She knew very well that she was too ignorant and humbly educated to support such an honour. She only wanted to know herself that she was my wife, my own lawful wife, united to me by the laws of heaven and earth. “The laws of heaven and earth as administered in a Registrar’s office. I have cast prudence to the winds, and am now committed to the step which I only dreamed of as a possibility last night. I have a sort of foreboding that the business will bring me into trouble; but having gone so far now, am I to recede? And then I am really desperately in love with this Cornish girl. “How is it to be done? These things seem so simple when one contemplates them in a dreamy reverie engendered by tobacco-smoke. It will be rather a complicated business, I fear; and the college friend, that is the grand question. Who is to be the convenient college friend? Perhaps I had better sleep upon it. “_8th._--After a world of serious consideration, I can think of no one but my brother. He’s a selfish beggar, who’d scarcely wet the tips of his fingers to save an entire ship’s crew from drowning; but he owes me money, and ought to go through fire and water to serve me. At any rate he is not troubled by any scruples or compunctions of the Sunday-school order; and then he’s a clever fellow, and on the spot. I’ll go up to town to-morrow and sound him about it.” There was no more. The journal ended here; and Francis Tredethlyn sat staring at the last half-page, sorely puzzled as to how he was to read that broken history. That the lines before him had been written by a heartless profligate he could scarcely doubt, little as he had been accustomed to sit in judgment on his fellow-men. But he was slow to understand the full measure of the writer’s depravity. A more subtle mind than his was required to read the hidden meaning of that carelessly-written diary. Francis Tredethlyn only understood that his cousin had fallen into the hands of a selfish worldling, who had been fascinated by her pretty face, but who set his own welfare and his own happiness before all thought of her love or sorrow. “He meant to marry her,” thought the young man; “thank heaven for that. No matter how secret or clandestine the marriage may have been, it shall be my task to find Susan, and to make that marriage public.” Mr. Tredethlyn went early the next day to Gray’s Inn, there to hold a solemn consultation with the chief of that firm which had transacted all Oliver Tredethlyn’s legal affairs during a period of some forty years. To Mr. Kursdale, Francis told all that he had been able to discover of his cousin Susan’s history; and to the lawyer’s hands he confided the manuscript volume surrendered to him by Mrs. Burfield.