"Right--your plain duty," said Alban bluntly. "Intricate sometimes are the obligations imposed on us as gentlemen; 'noblesse oblige' is a motto which involves puzzles for a casuist; but our duties as men are plain-- the idea very properly haunted you--and--" "And I hastened to exorcise the spectre. I left England--I went to the French town in which poor Matilda died--I could not, of course, make formal or avowed inquiries of a nature to raise into importance the very conspiracy (if conspiracy there were) which threatened me. But I saw the physician who had attended both my daughter and her child--I sought those who had seen them both when living--seen them both when dead. The doubt on my mind was dispelled--not a pretext left for my own self-torment. The only person needful in evidence whom I failed to see was the nurse to whom the infant had been sent. She lived in a village some miles from the town--I called at her house--she was out. I left word I should call the next day--I did so--she had absconded. I might, doubtless, have traced her, but to what end if she were merely Jasper's minion and tool? Did not her very flight prove her guilt and her terror? Indirectly I inquired into her antecedents and character. The inquiry opened a field of conjecture, from which I hastened to turn my eyes. This woman had a sister who had been in the service of Gabrielle Desmarets, and Gabrielle Desmarets had been in the neighbourhood during my poor daughter's life- time, and just after my daughter's death. And the nurse had had two infants under her charge; the nurse had removed with one of them to Paris--and Gabrielle Desmarets lived in Paris--and, O Alban, if there be really in flesh and life a child by Jasper Losely, to be forced upon my purse or my pity--is it his child, not by the ill-fated Matilda, but by the vile woman for whom Matilda, even in the first year of wedlock, was deserted? Conceive how credulity itself would shrink appalled from the horrible snare!--I to acknowledge, adopt, proclaim as the last of the Darrells, the adulterous offspring of a Jasper Losely and a Gabrielle Desmarets!--or, when I am in my grave, some claim advanced upon the sum settled by my marriage articles on Matilda's issue, and which, if a child survived, could not have been legally transferred to its father--a claim with witnesses suborned--a claim that might be fraudulently established --a claim that would leave the representative--not indeed of my lands and wealth, but, more precious far, of my lineage and blood--in--in the person of--of--" Darrell paused, almost stifling, and became so pale that Alban started from his seat in alarm. "It is nothing," resumed Darrell, faintly, "and, ill or well, I must finish this subject now, so that we need not reopen it."