“Agatha, you cannot marry James Zabel.  He is not an honest man.  He has defrauded me, me, your father, of several thousand dollars.  In a clever way, too, showing him to be as subtle as he is unprincipled.  Shall I tell you the wretched story, my girl?  He has left me to do so.  He sees as plainly as I do that any communication between you two after the discovery I have this day made would be but an added offence.  He is at least a gentleman, which is something, considering how near he came to being my son-in-law.”

I may have answered.  People do cry out when they are stabbed, sometimes, but I rather think I did not say a word, only looked a disdain which at that minute was as measureless as my belief in you.  You dishonest?  You—­Or perhaps I laughed; that would have been truer to my feeling; yes, I must have laughed.

My father’s next words indicated that I did something.

“You do not believe in his guilt,” he went on, and there was a kindness in his tone which gave me my first feeling of real terror.  “I can readily comprehend that, Agatha.  He has been in my office and acted under my eye for several years now, and I had almost as much confidence in him as you had, notwithstanding the fact that I liked him much better as my confidential clerk than as your probable or prospective husband.  He has never held the key to my heart; would God he never had to yours!  But he was a good and reliable man in the office, or so I thought, and I gave into his hand much of the work I ought to have done myself, especially since my health has more or less failed me.  My trust he abused.  A month ago—­it was during that ill turn you remember I received a letter from a man I had never expected to hear from again.  He was in my debt some ten thousand dollars, and wrote that he had brought with him as much of this sum as he had been able to save in the last five years, to Sutherlandtown, where he was now laid up with a dangerous illness from which he had small hope of recovering.  Would I come there and get it?  He was a stranger and wished to take no one into his confidence, but he had the money and would be glad to place it in my hands.  He added that as he was a lone man, without friends or relatives to inherit from him, he felt a decided pleasure at the prospect of satisfying his only creditor, and devoutly hoped he would be well enough to realise the transaction and receive my receipt.  But if his fever increased and he should be delirious or unconscious when I reached him, then I was to lift up the left-hand corner of the mattress on which he lay and take from underneath his head a black wallet in which I would find the money promised me.  He had elsewhere enough to pay all his expenses, so that the full contents of the wallet were mine.