was sheltered, her childhood reared, her youth guarded, her existence amply provided for."
"Right—your plain duty," said Alban, bluntly. "Intricate sometimes are the obligations imposed on us as gentlemen; 'noblesse obligé' is a motto which involves puzzles for a casuist; but our duties as men are plain—the idea very properly haunted you—and—"
"And I hastened to exorcise the spectre. I left England—I went to the French town in which poor Matilda died—I could not, of course, make formal or avowed inquiries of a nature to raise into importance the very conspiracy (if conspiracy there were) which threatened me. But I saw the physician who had attended both my daughter and her child—I saw those who had seen them both when living—seen them both when dead. The doubt on my mind was dispelled—not a pretext left for my own self-torment.
The only person needful in evidence whom I failed to see was the nurse to whom the infant had been sent. She lived in a village some miles from the town—I called at her house—she was out. I left word I should call the next day—I did so—she had absconded. I might, doubtless, have traced her, but to what end, if she were merely Jasper's minion and tool? Did not her very flight prove her guilt and her terror? Indirectly I inquired into her antecedents and character. The inquiry opened a field of conjecture, from which I hastened to turn my eyes. This woman had a sister who had been in the service of Gabrielle Desmarets; and Gabrielle Desmarets had been in the neighborhood during my poor daughter's life-time, and just after my daughter's death. And the nurse had had two infants under her charge; the nurse had removed with one of them to Paris—and Gabrielle Desmarets lived in Paris—and, oh, Alban, if there be really in flesh and life a child by Jasper Losely to be forced upon my purse or my pity—is it his child, not by the ill-fated Matilda, but by the vile woman for whom Matilda, even in the first year of wedlock, was deserted? Conceive how credulity itself would shrink appalled from the horrible snare!—I to acknowledge, adopt, proclaim as the last of the Darrells, the adulterous offspring of a Jasper Losely and a Gabrielle Desmarets!—or, when I am in my grave, some claim advanced upon the sum settled by my marriage articles on Matilda's issue, and which, if a child survived, could not have been legally transferred to its father—a claim with witnesses suborned—a claim that might be fraudulently established—a claim that would leave the representative—not indeed of my lands and
