‘John, if there is anything to be told to your discredit, if there is any act of your past life that you are ashamed to remember--ashamed to acknowledge--an act known to others, for pity’s sake let me hear it from you, and not from the lips of an enemy. Am I so severe a judge that you should fear to stand before me? Have I not been weakly fond, blindly trustful? Can you doubt my power to excuse and to pardon, where all the rest of mankind might be inexorable?’ ‘No,’ he answered quickly, ‘I will not doubt you. No, dear love, it is not because I feared to trust you that I have tried to keep my secret. I wished to spare you pain; for I knew that it would pain you to know how low I had sunk before your influence, your love, came to lift me out of the slough into which I had fallen. But it seems the pain must come. Good and pure as you are, there are those who will not spare you that bitter knowledge. Yes, dear, it is best that you should learn the truth first from my lips. Whatever garbled version of this story may be told you afterwards, you shall have the truth from me.’ He put his arm round her, and they went up the broad old staircase side by side to the room that had been Jasper Treverton’s study, and which Laura had beautified for her husband. Here they were secure from intrusion. John Treverton drew his wife’s favourite chair to the fire, and sat down by her side, as they had sat on the night when Laura told her husband the story of Mr. Desrolles. They sat for some minutes in silence, John Treverton looking at the fire, meditating how best to begin his confession. ‘Oh, Laura, I wonder whether you will hate me when you have heard what my past life was like?’ he said at last. ‘I will not spare myself; but even at this last moment I shrink from uttering the words that may destroy our happiness, and part us for ever. You shall be free to decide our fate. If, when you have heard all, you should say to yourself, “This man is unworthy of my love,” and if you should recoil from me--as you may--with disgust and abhorrence, I will bow my head to your decree, and disappear out of your life for ever.’ His wife turned her stricken face to him, pale as death. ‘What crime have you committed, that you can think it possible that I should withdraw my love from you?’ she asked, with tremulous lips. ‘I have committed no crime, Laura, but I have been suspected of the worst of crimes. Do you remember the story of a man whose name was bandied about in the newspapers nearly a year ago; a man whose wife was murdered, and whom some of the London papers plainly denounced as the murderer; the man called Chicot, whose disappearance was one of the social mysteries of the year?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered, looking at him wonderingly. ‘What can you have to do with that man?’ ‘I am that man!’ ‘You? You, John Treverton?’ ‘I, John Treverton, _alias_ Chicot.’ ‘The husband of a stage dancer?’