"Geoffrey Challoner,--_for it would be absurd in me to address you by any other name,--the lady who has the inexpressible misfortune of being dressed to her, and has begged me to reply to it. The reply to such a letter could not be confided to fitter hands than those of the lady's father, in which position I stand. The young lady whose professional name is Miss Grace Lambert is my natural daughter; the fact has been duly acknowledged by me, and the first act after the avowal is to champion my daughter's cause against a villain. For you are a villain, Geoffrey Challoner; though God knows it is with the deepest pain that I write such words of any man bearing your paternal name; for in applying this term to you I am not actuated by a remembrance of the wrongs you have done to Gertrude, I am not even thinking of the fearful crime which you committed, and which was revealed to her by your victim with his dying breath on the occasion of your final separation. I am looking back across a gulf of years to the time when the dearest friend I had in the world was your father. Now, Geoffrey Challoner, do you begin to understand? To me your father confided the narrative of the events which ended with your banishment from home, and your erasure from the family annals for ever. That narrative I have by me now. Your career has been hitherto so successful, you have gone so long unpunished, that you will be sceptical on this point, but I will prove it to you. That narrative, written in your father's own hand, sets forth your boyish disobedience, your tendency to dissipation, the impossibility to make you think or act rightly; and finally, your awful crime. When you have read thus far you will still cling to the hope that the knowledge of the nature of that crime may have passed into the grave with him whose heart it broke, who never held up his head after its discovery. If any such hope arises in you, it is my duty to stamp it out. Geoffrey Challoner, in my possession, complete in every detail from its commencement to its frustration, is the story of your attempted fratricide. There can be read, couched in your father's homely, serious, truth-begetting phrases, the record of how you, finding it impossible to undermine your father's confidence in your elder brother by lies and slanders of the most malignant nature, at length determined to step into that brother's position by taking away his life by poison. Do you admit the force of my position now, or would you wish the details brought out one by one into the light of day, before the public eye?_