My hand, with the letter in it, dropped to my side. Luck! Was this still Luck, or a fierce and merciless fatality? It had answered clear on my cry for light long uttered--an echo returned from a vast distance. “_To escape the consequences of an intrigue with some girl._” Oh! an excellent shot, Mr Travers--an intrigue with Lady Skene, _née_ Carey, that was to say. It was Dalston himself all the while, and I had been looking over his head for the principal. There could be no doubt about it. Here was the explanation of the beast’s hold on that wretched lady--a grip doubly dastard, since, it would seem, he had repudiated his responsibility for her shame only so long as he saw the opposite to any profit in admitting it. Could there be in hell a hound more abject? And to what, but a day earlier, had my inquiries been tending--to proof of what relationship with this infamous creature? That fable, thank God, was discounted before even realised by me. And yet for what alternative? There was none that I could see. If he was not trading upon her belief that I was his child, their child, what subtler knowledge helped him to her bleeding? Could it be one that turned upon the question of my apparent resurrection from the grave? Was I, perhaps, a changeling? It seemed incredible. To whose possible interest could it have been to substitute a living child for a dead one? Not to his assuredly--a piece of good fortune it would have appeared to him in those days, that fruit of his villainy perished and removed. To his victim’s, then? to her mother’s? There was more plausibility there. Yet I could not conceive Lady Skene a party to any such fraud; and yet again his discovery of the imposition, had it been committed, would not have weakened his hold on her--rather substantiated it. _Had_ she done this thing, or her mother for her, in order to levy false tax on the father of her dead child? It was a horrible thought. All night I sat out by the fire, hating it, and dismissing, and returning to it. The coincidence of this Dalston’s double connection with the family hardly occurred to me. And yet it was a coincidence, as strange as any that the annals of villainy can record. But then Coincidence is the father of Luck. This strange, strange letter! this old young voice from the clouds, dropping upon me all in an unexpected moment like a ghostly message from Thibet. It must have its meaning in the sequences of Fate--must have been meant to have. That the fellow should have been young Skene’s tutor--his monitor, great God! a vulgar intrigant, with a past, hardly past indeed, and caught, in despite of it, making eyes at “you-know-who”! You-know-who? How odd and plaintive sounded the arch allusion down all that flight of years, like a strange voice laughing very faint in distant attics. Poor little you-know-who! What had been thy pretty name and station, and to whose confidence was this cryptic reference to thee entrusted?