him. He had spoken with a sardonic indifference, almost with an
insolence of tone, which would have repelled the sympathies of any man
who heard him. And now, instead of placing himself at the table, and
addressing his story directly to the rector, he withdrew silently and
ungraciously to the window-seat. There he sat, his face averted, his
hands mechanically turning the leaves of his father's letter till
he came to the last. With his eyes fixed on the closing lines of the
manuscript, and with a strange mixture of recklessness and sadness in
his voice, he began his promised narrative in these words:

"The first thing you know of me," he said, "is what my father's
confession has told you already. He mentions here that I was a child,
asleep on his breast, when he spoke his last words in this world, and
when a stranger's hand wrote them down for him at his deathbed.
That stranger's name, as you may have noticed, is signed on the
cover--'Alexander Neal, Writer to the Signet, Edinburgh.' The first
recollection I have is of Alexander Neal beating me with a horsewhip (I
dare say I deserved it), in the character of my stepfather."

"Have you no recollection of your mother at the same time?" asked Mr.
Brock.

"Yes; I remember her having shabby old clothes made up to fit me,
and having fine new frocks bought for her two children by her second
husband. I remember the servants laughing at me in my old things, and
the horsewhip finding its way to my shoulders again for losing my temper
and tearing my shabby clothes. My next recollection gets on to a year or
two later. I remember myself locked up in a lumber-room, with a bit of
bread and a mug of water, wondering what it was that made my mother and
my stepfather seem to hate the very sight of me. I never settled that
question till yesterday, and then I solved the mystery, when my father's
letter was put into my hands. My mother knew what had really happened
on board the French timber-ship, and my stepfather knew what had really
happened, and they were both well aware that the shameful secret which
they would fain have kept from every living creature was a secret
which would be one day revealed to _me_. There was no help for
it--the confession was in the executor's hands, and there was I, an
ill-conditioned brat, with my mother's negro blood in my face, and my
murdering father's passions in my heart, inheritor of their secret in
spite of them! I don't wonder at the horsewhip now,