, himself unseen and irresponsible. At last
three companies, for the promotion of which my father was responsible,
came to grief in a heap. Fraud was written large over all their history,
and, while Foggatt retired with his plunder, my father was left to meet
ruin, disgrace, and imprisonment. From beginning to end he, and he only,
was responsible. There was no shred of evidence to connect Foggatt with
the matter, and no means of escape from the net drawn about my father. He
lived through three years of imprisonment, and then, entirely abandoned by
the man who had made use of his simplicity, he died--of nothing but shame
and a broken heart.

"Of this I knew nothing at the time. Again and again, as a small boy, I
remember asking of my mother why I had no father at home, as other boys
had--unconscious of the stab I thus inflicted on her gentle heart. Of her
my earliest, as well as my latest, memory is that of a pale, weeping
woman, who grudged to let me out of her sight.

"Little by little I learned the whole cause of my mother's grief, for she
had no other confidant, and I fear my character developed early, for my
first coherent remembrance of the matter is that of a childish design to
take a table-knife and kill the bad man who had made my father die in
prison and caused my mother to cry.

"One thing, however, I never knew--the name of that bad man. Again and
again, as I grew older, I demanded to know, but my mother always withheld
it from me, with a gentle reminder that vengeance was for a greater hand
than mine.

"I was seventeen years of age when my mother died. I believe that nothing
but her strong attachment to myself and her desire to see me safely
started in life kept her alive so long. Then I found that through all
those years of narrowed means she had contrived to scrape and save a
little money--sufficient, as it afterward proved, to see me through the
examinations for entrance to my profession, with the generous assistance
of my father's old legal advisers, who gave me my articles, and who have
all along treated me with extreme kindness.

"For most of the succeeding years my life does not concern the matter in
hand. I was a lawyer's clerk in my benefactors' service, and afterward a
qualified man among their assistants. All through the firm were careful,
in pursuance of my poor mother's wishes, that I should not learn the name
or whereabouts of the man who had wrecked her life and my father's. I
first met t