“Take your hand from off my throat, Varney, and I will then tell you what brought me here.”

Sir Francis Varney did so.

“Rise,” he said—­“rise; I have seen blood enough to be sickened at the prospect of more; but you should not have come here and tempted me.”

“Nay, believe me, I came here for good and not for evil.  Sir Francis Varney, hear me out, and then judge for yourself whether you can blame the perseverance which enabled me to find out this secret place of refuge; but let me first say that now it is as good a place of concealment to you as before it was, for I shall not betray you.”

“Go on, go on.  What is it you desire?”

“During the long and weary hours of my captivity, I thought deeply, and painfully too, as may be well imagined, of all the circumstances connected with your appearance at Bannerworth Hall, and your subsequent conduct.  Then I felt convinced that there was something far more than met the eye, in the whole affair, and, from what I have been informed of since, I am the more convinced that some secret, some mystery, which it is in your power only perhaps to explain, lurks at the bottom of all your conduct.”

“Well, proceed,” said Varney.

“Have I not said enough now to enable you to divine the object of my visit?  It is that you should shake off the trammels of mystery in which you have shrouded yourself, and declare what it is you want, what it is you desire, that has induced you to set yourself up as such a determined foe of the Bannerworth family.”

“And that, you say, is the modest request that brings you here?”

“You speak as it you thought it was idle curiosity that prompts me, but you know it is not.  Your language and manner are those of a man of too much sagacity not to see that I have higher notions.”

“Name them.”

“You have yourself, in more than one instance, behaved with a strange sort of romantic generosity, as if, but for some great object which you felt impelled to seek by any means, and at any sacrifice, you would be a something in character and conduct very different from what you are.  One of my objects, then, is to awaken that better nature which is slumbering within you, only now and then rousing itself to do some deed which should be the character of all your actions—­for your own sake I have come.”

“But not wholly?”

“Not wholly, as you say.  There is another than whom, the whole world is not so dear to me.  That other one was serene as she was beautiful.  Happiness danced in her eyes, and she ought—­for not more lovely is the mind that she possesses than the glorious form that enshrines it—­to be happy.  Her life should have passed like one long summer’s day of beauty, sunshine, and pure heavenly enjoyment.  You have poisoned the cup of joy that the great God of nature had permitted her to place to her lips and taste of mistrustingly.  Why have you done this?  I ask you—­why have you done this?”