"You can, then, understand what a dilemma we were in some three months ago. My sister had attracted the notice of an English aristocrat. He loved her and wished to marry her. We admired him--or rather we admired his position (I would be bitterly true at this hour) and wished to see the union effected. But there was a secret in our family, which if known, would make such a marriage impossible. A crime perpetrated before my birth had attached disgrace to our name and race, and Mr. Harrington is a man to fly disgrace quicker than he would death. Miss Sterling, it would be useless for me to try to make myself out better than I am. When I heard that my father, whom I am just beginning to revere but of whom in those days I had rather a careless opinion, was determined to acknowledge his convict son through the daughter which had been sent over here, I revolted. Not that I begrudged this young girl the money he wished to leave her,--though from a somewhat morbid idea of reparation which my father possessed, he desired to give her an amount that would materially affect our fortunes--but that I loved my sister, and above all loved the proud and isolated position we had obtained in society, and could not endure the results which the revelation of such a stain in, our family must produce. Not my mother, whose whole life since her marriage had been one haughty protest against this secret shame, nor Guy, with all his cynicism and pride, felt stronger on this point than I. To my warped judgment any action within the bounds of reason seemed justifiable that would prevent my dying father from bringing this disgrace upon his children; and being accustomed to defer to my mother's judgments and desires,--she was not only a powerful woman, Constance, but possessed of a strange fascination for those she loved and sought to govern--I lent myself sufficiently to her schemes to stand neutral in the struggle between my father's wishes and her determination, though that father would often turn upon me with a gaze of entreaty that went to my heart. That he had taken advantage of his last journey to Boston to have a new will drawn, and that his only desire now was for an opportunity to get this same safely transferred into the hands of his lawyer, I never suspected any more than did my mother or brother. We thought that as far as the past was concerned we were secure, and that if we could prevent an interview between him and Mr. Nicholls, the future would likewise be safe from a discovery of our secret It was therefore a terrible shock to my mother and afterwards to me when we learned that he had already accomplished the act we so much dreaded and that the clergyman we had called in at my father's urgent request, had been entrusted with the paper that was to proclaim our shame to the world. But the disappointment, great as it was, had little time to exert its force on me, for with my brother's recital of what had taken place at my father's death-bed there came a