“Because he had run through his property and was reduced to beggary. He had led a fast and gay life and had nothing left to live upon. The villa and all its furniture were mortgaged beyond their value, and were to be seized. There would be nothing left for him and the deformed maniac, his daughter, whom, despite her afflictions, he seemed to cherish with a strange morbid affection.” Mr. Rodney could not repress a shudder of disgust. He thought of his three brilliant, beautiful children with a feeling of pride, and he wondered that even a father’s heart could have cherished tenderness for the dreadful, misshapen maniac of Delaney House. “So he formed that dreadful plan for providing his deformed and maniac daughter with a husband to take care of her, and then he consummated it in the way I have told you. When it became impossible to enjoy the wealth and pleasures of this world any longer, he sent himself out of it, with a shocking deliberateness, and shifted his burden upon my shoulders.” “He was a villain! But you were not compelled to accept the loathsome legacy he bequeathed to you. The marriage, being with a person of unsound mind, was really null and void in the eyes of the law,” said the lawyer. “I did not resort to the law to help me out of my trouble,” said Oran Delaney. “I was too proud, for one thing, to let the public know how shamefully I had been duped. I was bitterly ashamed of my own credulity; besides, I was weighted down by the solemnity of my oath to the dying. I could not forsake poor Julie Sanson, even though I had been so horribly duped and deceived. I had sworn to devote my life to her; and, in his letter of confession to me, Monsieur Sanson again committed his daughter solemnly to my care, urging that, as he had once saved my life, it was but right that I should devote it to the daughter left so helpless and forlorn by his sinful death.” “He had much better have let you die, than saved your life to such a horrible end!” exclaimed Mr. Rodney. “Much better,” sighed Oran Delaney. “But, as it was, I accepted his dying charge. I brought Julie Sanson to America, and confided her to the care of my old nurse, Mrs. Griffin. I have lived at Delaney House in seclusion for years, shunning my kind, because in my morbid pride, I had sworn that the carping, censorious world should never know my dreadful secret. Mrs. Griffin has been most faithful in her trust.