"Silas Craig," cried Augustus Horton, "have you no word to answer to all this? Can you sit calmly there and hear these accusations? Speak, man, speak, and give your accuser the lie." "He cannot!" said Philip Treverton, pointing to the lawyer. "Is that the attitude of a man who is falsely accused? Look at him; look at him crouching like a beaten hound beneath its master's whip." "Do not speak of him," cried Gerald Leslie, impetuously, "but explain this mystery. How is it that for a twelvemonth you have disappeared from New Orleans, to return at this moment of ruin and despair?" "I will tell you," answered Philip Treverton; "and I call upon this man, William Bowen, here, to bear witness of my truth, and on yonder wretch to contradict me if he dare. Upward of a year ago I was left by you with the sum of one hundred thousand dollars in my hands--the amount of the loan advanced to our firm by the usurer, Silas Craig. This was to be repaid upon a certain date; that date fell about a month after your departure for England. I held the money more sacred than my life, and I laid it by in the strong box devoted to important documents." "You did as I myself would have done," said Gerald Leslie. "I did; but I was by no means faultless. I was the victim of a vice which has brought dishonor upon men who never thought to blush before their fellow men--I was a gamester! I devoted my days to business cheerfully, conscientiously; but at night the demon of the dice-box lured me from my quiet home, and led me to a secret gaming-house in Columbia Street--a house known to all the gamblers of New Orleans, but which flourishes in bold defiance of the law. I had known this house for years, and had been a constant guest at its unholy altars, but there was one thing concerning it that I did not know." "And that was--?" "Its owner! I did not know that Silas Craig, the lawyer, that sanctimonious attorney whom men met every Sunday morning in the sacred temple of Heaven; I did not know that this man was the proprietor of that earthly hell, the wretch that pandered in secret to the vices of his fellow-citizens. I did not know this, and I did not know that the gaming-house in Columbia Street communicated by a secret passage with the office of Silas Craig." "Impossible!" exclaimed Augustus Horton.