XXXIX

hundred thousand dollars I had sent West, had been used to advantage, and only day before yesterday I was enabled to sell out my share in the mine, for a large sum that leaves me free and unembarrassed, to make the fortune of more than one Japha, should God ever see fit to send them across my pathway. More than that, Mr. Delafield, of whose discretion I had sometimes had my fears, was dead, having perished of a fever some months before in San Francisco; and of all men living, there were none as I believed, who knew anything to the discredit of my name. I was clear, or so I thought, in fortune and in fame; and being so, dreamed of taking to my empty and yearning arms, the loveliest and the purest of mortal women. But God watched over you and prevented an act whose consequences might have been so cruel. In an hour, Paula, in an hour, I had learned that the foul thing was not dead, that a witness had picked up the words I had allowed to fall in my interview with my father-in-law in the restaurant two years before; an unscrupulous witness who had been on my track ever since, and who now in his eagerness for a victim, had by mistake laid his clutch upon our Bertram. Yes, owing to the similarity of our voices and the fact that we both make use of a certain telltale word, this patient and upright nephew of mine stands at this moment under the charge of having acknowledged in the hearing of this person, to the committal of an act of dishonesty in the past. A foolish charge you will say, and one easily refuted. Alas, a fresh act of dishonesty lately perpetrated in the bank, complicates matters. A theft has been committed on some of Mr. Stuyvesant’s effects, and that, too, under circumstances that involuntarily arouse suspicion against some one of the bank