made simultaneously to two men who called themselves your lovers, and its sad necessity explained by your ever-watchful guardian.  One of these lovers repudiated your claims upon him, and turned coldly from the idea of uniting his fate to that of one who had even for an hour been a suspected lunatic; the other declared himself willing to take her as she was to his arms, even though her own were loaded with the chains of a mad-house!  Penniless and abandoned by all the world, and with a clouded name, he woos her as his wife—­the woman he adores!”

And, as he read, or seemed to read, these words, with scarce an accent to mar their impetuous flow, Dr. Englehart drew in his breath with the hissing sound of passion, and folded his arms tightly across his padded breast, as if they enfolded the bride he was suing for in another’s name.

“And who, let me ask, is this Paladin of chivalry?” I inquired, derisively.  “Give me his name, that I may consider the subject well and thoroughly before we meet at last.”

“Excuse me if I refuse to give the name of eider of dese gentlemen at dis onhappy season,” he rejoined.  “Wen de brain is all right again”—­tapping his own forehead—­“your guardian will conduct the faithful knight to kneel at de feet of her he loves so well.”

“And the other—­where is he?” fell involuntarily from my lips—­my heaving heart—­an inquiry that I regretted as soon as it was uttered; for, affecting sorrowful mystery, the man inclined himself toward me and whispered in my ear confidentially: 

“Plighted to another, and gone where no eyes of yours shall rest on him again.”

“Pander—­liar—­spy!” burst from my passionate lips as in all the fury of desperation I turned from the creature who had so wantonly wounded my self-respect, and waved to him to begone.  Another name quivered on my lips, but I checked it on their threshold after that first burst of indignation instantly subdued.

I was not brave enough nor strong enough to hazard a shaft like that which might have been returned to me so deathfully.  I would let the barrier stand which he had erected between us, and which to demolish would be to lay myself open, perhaps, to insult of the darkest description.

Let the ostrich with his head in the sand still imagine himself unseen; the masquerader still conceive himself secure beneath his paper travesty; the serpent still coil apparently unrecognized beside the bare, gray stone that reveals him to the eye—­I was too cowardly, too feeble, to cope with strategy and double-dyed duplicity like this!

So the man went his way with his silly secret undiscovered, as he deemed, and that it might remain so to the end, as far as he could know, I devoutly prayed.  For I knew of old the unscrupulous lengths to which, when nerved by hate or disappointment or passions of any kind, he could go, without a particle of mercy for his victims or remorse for his ill-doing.