“I am bound to furnish you with every information I can. The young ones knew nothing of his existence. Gussy did; but only that I kept him there to save him from an asylum where he might have been treated cruelly--nothing more. You will not take a high moral tone against me, as she is ready to do, and Dolff----” “No; I will take up no high moral tone,” said Meredith; “but the position is very difficult. You have not, I suppose, done away with the money?” “It is well invested; it is intact. We could not have lived as we have done on my own money. Now, of course, I must give it up---- And no injustice need be done,” she added, with a sigh; “it can be paid--at last.” “With interest for all these years?” said Meredith, with a smile. “Oh, what are you talking of?” She said, “People will be so glad to get anything so unexpectedly, that they will say nothing about interest. I even think----” “What do you even think?” he said, as she paused. “How can I tell how you may take it, whether it will commend itself to you or not? There might still be an arrangement by which things might be--tided over.” “After it gets into the papers and it is known that you have been concealing----” “Oh,” she cried again, “you are more dull than I gave you credit for being, Charley Meredith! Who will notice up in Liverpool a romantic story (which is all the papers will make of it) occurring in St. John’s Wood? Who will link one thing to another and understand exactly what has happened, or believe that---- I might have taken him in, a miserable wreck, out of sheer love and kindness. I did! I did!” she cried, suddenly, her face melting out of its hardness, her eyes filling with tears. “You may not believe me, but I did. I thought he had not a penny. I went to all the expense of fitting up the wing for him--working with my own hands at it, that nobody should suspect--believing that Vicars had brought him back with his own money--that _he_ had none---- I did, though you may not believe me,” she said. “I have not said I did not believe you. We are all very queer creatures--mixed up. And then when you found he had that old pocketbook--for it was full of something better than old papers then--you were tempted, and you----” She nodded her head; then said, after a while, “I do not accept that formula. I was tempted--and I did what I had a right to do. _I_ had wronged nobody--I knew nothing about the debts. If I had divided _that_ among them, what would it have been?--a trifle to each, but enough to dry up all the sympathy they were meeting with. He had made ducks and drakes of more than that belonging to me. And the children were the most deeply wronged. I took it for their sakes, to make up what they had been robbed of. It can go to the others now, and you will see how much it will be.” “You said something,” said Meredith, “about an arrangement that might still be made?” “Yes--if you could lend yourself to it, Charley. It could not be done without you.”