“That’s well said, girl.  Be you the hand, and I the head, then, of this enterprise, and we shall conquer yet.  I say again, that if they could, these men would swear my Richard’s life away.  They might as well do that as what they mean to do, and deprive him of his liberty; cast him for years into prison, and herd with the worst and basest of mankind; to work under a task-master with irons on.  Do you understand, girl, what it is to which, unless we can hinder them, these wretches would doom him?”

“Yes, yes, I do,” she murmured, shuddering.  “It is horrible, most horrible!  God help us!”

“We must help ourselves,” answered Mrs. Gilbert, sternly.

“Yet God is surely on our side, and for the truth, madam.  If they swear falsely—­”

“You must swear also,” interrupted the other, angrily; “you must meet them with their own weapons, if you would defend the innocent against them.  As it is, the law is with them, and will prove the instrument of their vengeance.  The notes were found upon his person; he strove to change them, that he might pass their substitutes more easily.  He counted upon your father not missing them from his strong-box until it was too late.  The case is clear against him that he stole them.”

“Great Heaven!” cried Harry, clasping her hands in agony; “and yet he did not mean to steal them.”

“Of course not; nay more, he did not steal them, for you gave them to him.”

“I gave them to him?  Nay, I never did.”

“You did—­you did, girl; you acquiesced in his plan for obtaining your father’s consent to your engagement; you undertook to supply him temporarily with the money requisite to establish his pretensions as a man of fortune.  Or, if you did not”—­and here her voice assumed an intense earnestness—­“your Richard, the man you pretend to love, will be a convicted felon—­a prisoner for all the summer of his life, and for the rest an outcast!”

Harry was silent; her hands were pressed to her forehead, as though to compel her fevered brain to think without distraction.  “I see, I see,” she murmured, presently; “his fate hangs upon my word.  ’So help me, God,’ is what I have first to say, and then say that!”

“Why not?” rejoined the other, stoutly.  “Will not these men, too, call God to witness what they know to be a lie?  Will not He discern the motive that prompts you—­desire to see a wronged man righted, the innocent set free—­and the motive that prompts them—­malicious hate?  Or do you deem the all-seeing eye of Heaven is purblind?  I tell you this, girl, if I were in your place, and the man I loved stood justly in such peril, I would swear a score such oaths to set him free!  Yet here, with justice on your side and truth, and Heaven itself, you hesitate; you shrink from uttering a mere form of words, the spirit of which is contrary to the letter, and for conscience