his foolishness depart from him."

"I know I am not like you, madam," answered Harry, piteously. "Richard
has often told me how wise and brave you are; but yet my love for him is
as great as yours can be. Whatever you think fit that I should do to
help him, that shall be done. Trust me; it shall, indeed."

"That's well said, girl. Be you the hand, and I the head, then, of this
enterprise, and we shall conquer yet. I say again, that if they could,
these men would swear my Richard's life away. They might as well do that
as what they mean to do, and deprive him of his liberty; cast him for
years into prison, and herd with the worst and basest of mankind; to
work under a task-master with irons on. Do you understand, girl, what it
is to which, unless we can hinder them, these wretches would doom him?"

"Yes, yes, I do," she murmured, shuddering. "It is horrible, most
horrible! God help us!"

"We must help ourselves," answered Mrs. Gilbert, sternly.

"Yet God is surely on our side, and for the truth, madam. If they swear
falsely--"

"You must swear also," interrupted the other, angrily; "you must meet
them with their own weapons, if you would defend the innocent against
them. As it is, the law is with them, and will prove the instrument of
their vengeance. The notes were found upon his person; he strove to
change them, that he might pass their substitutes more easily. He
counted upon your father not missing them from his strong-box until it
was too late. The case is clear against him that he stole them."

"Great Heaven!" cried Harry, clasping her hands in agony; "and yet he
did not mean to steal them."

"Of course not; nay more, he did _not_ steal them, for _you gave them to
him_."

"_I_ gave them to him? Nay, I never did."

"You did--you did, girl; you acquiesced in his plan for obtaining your
father's consent to your engagement; you undertook to supply him
temporarily with the money requisite to establish his pretensions as a
man of fortune. Or, if you did _not_"--and here her voice assumed an
intense earnestness--"your Richard, the man you pretend to love, will be
a convicted felon--a prisoner for all the summer of his life, and for
the rest an outcast!"

Harry was silent; her hands were pressed to her forehead, as though to
compel her fevered brain to think without distraction. "I see, I see,"
she murmured, presently; "his fate hangs upon my word. 'So help me,
God,' is what I have first to say, and then say