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“I shall require all your attention, Mr. Talboys,” he said, “for that which I have to disclose to you is of a very painful nature. Your son was my very dear friend—dear to me for many reasons. Perhaps most of all dear, because I had known him and been with him through the great trouble of his life; and because he stood comparatively alone in the world—cast off by you who should have been his best friend, bereft of the only woman he had ever loved.”

“The daughter of a drunken pauper,” Mr. Talboys remarked, parenthetically.

“Had he died in his bed, as I sometimes thought be would,” continued Robert Audley, “of a broken heart, I should have mourned for him very sincerely, even though I had closed his eyes with my own hands, and had seen him laid in his quiet resting-place. I should have grieved for my old schoolfellow, and for the companion who had been dear to me. But this grief would have been a very small one compared to that which I feel now, believing, as I do only too firmly, that my poor friend has been murdered.”

“Murdered!”

The father and daughter simultaneously repeated the horrible word. The father’s face changed to a ghastly duskiness of hue; the daughter’s face dropped upon her clasped hands, and was never lifted again throughout the interview.

“Mr. Audley, you are mad!” exclaimed Harcourt Talboys; “you are mad, or else you are commissioned by your friend to play upon my feelings. I protest against this proceeding as a conspiracy, and I—I revoke my intended forgiveness of the person who was once my son!”

He was himself again as he said this. The blow had been a sharp one, but its effect had been momentary.

“It is far from my wish to alarm you unnecessarily, sir,” answered Robert. “Heaven grant that you may be right and I wrong. I pray for it, but I cannot think it—I cannot even hope it. I come to you for advice. I will state to you plainly and dispassionately the circumstances which have aroused my suspicions. If you say those suspicions are foolish and unfounded I am ready to submit to your better judgment. I will leave England; and I abandon my search for the evidence wanting to—to confirm my fears. If you say go on, I will go on.”

Nothing could be more gratifying to the vanity of Mr. Harcourt Talboys than this appeal. He declared himself ready to listen to all that Robert might have to say, and ready to assist him to the uttermost of his power.

He laid some stress upon this last assurance, deprecating the value of his advice with an affectation that was as transparent as his vanity itself.

Robert Audley drew his chair nearer to that of Mr. Talboys, and commenced a minutely detailed account of all that had occurred to George from the time of his arrival in England to the hour of his disappearance, as well as all that had occurred since his disappearance in any way touching upon that particular subject. Harcourt Talboys listened with demonstrative attention, now and then interrupting the speaker to ask some magisterial kind of question. Clara Talboys never once lifted her face from her clasped hands.

The hands of the clock pointed to a quarter past eleven when Robert began his story. The clock struck twelve as he finished.

He had carefully suppressed the names of his uncle and his uncle’s wife in relating the circumstances in which they had been concerned.

“Now, sir,” he said, when the story had been told, “I await your decision. You have heard my reasons for coming to this terrible conclusion. In what manner do these reasons influence you?”

“They don’t in any way turn me from my previous opinion,” answered Mr. Harcourt Talboys, with the unreasoning pride of an obstinate man. “I still think, as I thought before, that my son is alive, and that his disappearance is a conspiracy against myself. I decline to become the victim of that conspiracy,”

“And you tell me to stop?” asked Robert, solemnly.