"You are right—it was Roger Moreland—he is very hard up, and as he was a friend of poor Whyte's, asked me to assist him, which I did."
He hated to hear himself telling such a deliberate falsehood, but there was no help for it—Madge must never know the truth as long as he could conceal it.
"Just like you," said Madge, kissing him lightly with filial pride. "The best and kindest of men."
He shivered slightly as he felt her caress, and thought how she would recoil from him did she know all. "After all," says some cynical writer, "the illusions of youth are mostly due to the want of experience." Madge, ignorant in a great measure of the world, cherished her pleasant illusions, though many of them had been destroyed by the trials of the past year, and her father longed to keep her in this frame of mind.
"Now go down to dinner, my dear," he said, leading her to the door. "I will follow soon."
"Don't be long," replied his daughter, "or I shall come up again," and she ran down the stairs, her heart feeling strangely light.
Her father looked after her until she vanished, then, heaving a regretful sigh, returned to his study, and taking out the scattered papers fastened them together and endorsed them, "My Confession." He then placed them in an envelope, sealed it, and put it back in the desk. "If all that is in that packet were known," he said aloud, as he left the room, "what would the world say?"
That night he was singularly brilliant at the dinner table. Generally a very reticent and grave man, on this night he laughed and talked so gaily that the very servants noticed the change. The fact was he felt a sense of relief at having unburdened his mind, and felt as though by writing out that confession he had laid the spectre which had haunted him for so long. His daughter was delighted at the change in his spirits, but the old Scotch nurse, who had been in the house since Madge was a baby, shook her head—
"He's fey," she said gravely. "He's no lang for the warld." Of course she was laughed at—people who believe in presentiments generally are—but, nevertheless, she held firmly to her opinion.
Mr. Frettlby went to bed early that night, as the excite-
