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“When we met for the first time at North Villa, I had not been five minutes in your presence before I detected your curiosity to know something about me, and perceived that you doubted, from the first, whether I was born and bred for such a situation as I held under Mr. Sherwin.  Failing—­as I knew you would fail—­to gain any information about me from my employer or his family, you tried, at various times, to draw me into familiarity, to get me to talk unreservedly to you; and only gave up the attempt to penetrate my secret, whatever it might be, when we parted after our interview at my house on the night of the storm.  On that night, I determined to baulk your curiosity, and yet to gain your confidence; and I succeeded.  You little thought, when you bade me farewell at my own door, that you had given your hand and your friendship to a man, who—­long before you met with Margaret Sherwin—­had inherited the right to be the enemy of your father, and of every descendant of your father’s house.

“Does this declaration surprise you?  Read on, and you will understand it.

“I am the son of a gentleman.  My father’s means were miserably limited, and his family was not an old family, like yours.  Nevertheless, he was a gentleman in anybody’s sense of the word; he knew it, and that knowledge was his ruin.  He was a weak, kind, careless man; a worshipper of conventionalities; and a great respecter of the wide gaps which lay between social stations in his time.  Thus, he determined to live like a gentleman, by following a gentleman’s pursuit—­a profession, as distinguished from a trade.  Failing in this, he failed to follow out his principle, and starve like a gentleman.  He died the death of a felon; leaving me no inheritance but the name of a felon’s son.

“While still a young man, he contrived to be introduced to a gentleman of great family, great position, and great wealth.  He interested, or fancied he interested, this gentleman; and always looked on him as the patron who was to make his fortune, by getting him the first government sinecure (they were plenty enough in those days!) which might fall vacant.  In firm and foolish expectation of this, he lived far beyond his little professional income—­lived among rich people without the courage to make use of them as a poor man.  It was the old story:  debts and liabilities of all kinds pressed heavy on him—­creditors refused to wait—­exposure and utter ruin threatened him—­and the prospect of the sinecure was still as far off as ever.

“Nevertheless he believed in the advent of this office; and all the more resolutely now, because he looked to it as his salvation.  He was quite confident of the interest of his patron, and of its speedy exertion in his behalf.  Perhaps, that gentleman had overrated his own political influence; perhaps, my father had been too sanguine, and had misinterpreted polite general promises into special engagements.  However it