I directed Cynthia's attention to this account, and she was so startled by it that she changed colour, and offered so many visible evidences of her distress, that I feared she would have excited the suspicions of the parson, yet after all that must have been an impossible feat, for I am sure the honest parson was a man so utterly without guile, that he was incapable of harbouring any sort of suspicion against a fellow-creature. Besides he was still fully occupied in lamenting the low repute into which our name had fallen, with a grief so genuine that I did not know whether to be touched or amused by it. However, I could not pay much heed to the parson at that minute, being deeply concerned for little Cynthia. I began to fear that I had done an ill-considered thing in allowing her to see the news-sheet. I had never tried to find out how far she was acquainted with my history of the past few years--my gaming, duels, intrigues and debts. That she must have known of it to some extent was certain. She had heard of them from my own lips in a haphazard sort of way; and again, they were too well known to be suppressed, as witness the conduct of her father in the matter of my suit. At his hands, and those of my friends, and of my rival too, they would certainly lose nothing of their magnitude. Whatever she had heard of me, she had been able to condone. But now confronted with a more circumstantial charge against me, clothed in all the authority of black and white, a charge of the most terrible character that can be preferred against any person, it came on her with a cruel force that almost crushed her down. She stood faltering, with the newspaper still clutched in her hands; her lips trembled, and the tears gathered slowly in her eyes. "I don't believe it," said she, in a low, shaking voice. She held out her hand, and I, despite the presence of the parson, took it to my lips with the same passion with which she had extended it to me. If a man in the midst of all the contumely and detraction of the world, can yet get one woman to believe in him, it is enough! Meantime the parson, whatever he may have thought of our behaviour, not that it is altogether certain that he happened to witness it, was so strangely ingenuous that he took my little one's distress to spring from the same source as his own. He laid it all to that precious Commentary on the _Analects of Confucius_!