“You see, Sir Gilbert, this is how it was,” went on Luigi, who now seemed eagerly anxious to unbosom himself. “When Mrs. Clare came to London she knew nothing about her husband having been your son. He died in America, and, as it would appear, without having told her anything about his relatives in England. It was Captain Verinder who ferreted out the facts of the case, and everything that followed was due to him. Mrs. Clare’s only child had died when it was a few months old, but he persuaded her that if she were to introduce herself to you, bringing a son and heir with her, she would have a far greater claim on your generosity, and might count upon a very different reception at your hands, from any that would be given her as the childless widow she really was. Of myself I can only say that I was weak enough to be overborne by my uncle’s persuasions, and—and that I ultimately consented to allow myself to be passed off as your grandson.” Luigi ceased, and for a little while no one spoke. Sir Gilbert, in an absent way, was rubbing his eyeglasses with his pocket-handkerchief, and apparently turning over in his mind what had just been told him. Looking up at length, he said: “You have been frank with me so far, or so I have reason to believe. I hope you will not be less so in answering my next question. Tell me, then, if you please, to what circumstances it was owing that I found you locked up in my strong room.” Luigi hung his head in a way he had not done before, while two spots of vivid red flamed out on his sallow cheeks. Then, flinging up his head with a sort of half-defiant air, he said: “I promised to tell you the truth, Sir Gilbert, and I will. Last night, after waiting till the clock had struck twelve, I came here, picked the lock of your drawer, found the key of the strong room, opened the door and went inside. My intention was to abstract certain American bonds which I knew were there, and pass them over to my uncle for him to dispose of.” “This latter transaction, then, was one in which your uncle was also mixed up?” “It was his notion entirely, that I should get possession of the bonds. We were both cornered. Nearly all the money you gave us for travelling purposes, had been lost at a Brussels gaming-table. We succeeded in borrowing a hundred pounds on our joint note of hand, which will fall due about a week hence. In order to meet it and so keep the affair from coming to your ears, which it otherwise inevitably would do, my uncle egged me on to abstract four of the bonds in question, the proceeds of the sale of which would have extricated us from our predicament.” “As pretty a piece of villainy as I have heard tell of for many a long day!” remarked Sir Gilbert. “But you were disturbed by someone when in the midst of your nefarious work, otherwise I should not have found you this morning under lock and key.”