"I will tell you, John," said Alice; "I always intended to do so. It is the only thing I have kept back from you; and often and often, while you have been away, have I thought, if anything happened to you or to me--if either of us were to die, I mean, John--how grieved I should be that I had not told you of this matter. Arthur Preston pretended he loved me; but he could not have done so really. No man who is wicked and base can know what real love is, John; and Arthur Preston was both. Some little time before I knew you, he made love to me--fierce, violent love. I had not seen you then, John; I had scarcely seen any one. I was an unsophisticated country girl, and I judged of the reality of his love by the warmth of his professions, and told him I would marry him. I shall never forget that scene. It was one summer's evening, on the river bank just abreast of Bishopthorpe. When I mentioned marriage he almost laughed, and then he told me, in a cynical sneering way, that he never intended to be married unless he could find some one with a large fortune, or with peculiar means of extending his uncle's business when he inherited it; but that meanwhile he would give me the prettiest house within twenty miles. I need not go on. He would not make me his wife, but he offered to make me his mistress. Was it not unmanly in him, John? Was it not base and cowardly?" She stopped and looked at her husband. But John Claxton, whose face had become pale again, his chin resting on his hand, and his eyes glaring into the fire, made her no reply. CHAPTER VI. A SAFE INVESTMENT. "The second-floor front have come in, Ben," said Mrs. Mogg, of 19A Poland-street, as she opened the door to her husband on a wet and windy autumnal evening; "she have come and brought her luggage--a green carpet-bag with a poll-parrot worked on it, and a foreign-looking bandbox tied up in a handkerchief. She's French, Ben, that's what she is." "Is she?" said Mr. Mogg shortly. "Well, I'm hungry, that's what I am; so get me my tea." He had had a long and dirty walk home from the West-India Docks, where he was employed as a warehouseman, and chattering in a windy passage about his wife's lodger scarcely seemed to him the most desirable way of employing his first moments at home. But after dispatching two large breakfast-cups of tea, and several rounds Of hot salt-buttered toast, from which the crust had been carefully cut away, Mr. Mogg was somewhat mollified, and wiping his mouth and fingers on the dirty tablecloth, felt himself in cue to resume the conversation. "O, the new second-floor has come, Martha, has she?" he commenced; "and she's French, you think. Well," continued Mr. Mogg, who was naturally rather slow in bringing his ideas into focus, "Dickson may or may not be a French name. That it's an English one, we all know; but that's no reason that it should not be a French one too, there being, as is well known, several words which are the same in both languages."