e one
else you were often with."

He lay for some time without speaking. At last he said, slowly,--"I
see,--I see,--I see,"--three times. Then, turning his eyes away from me,
he kept on,--"What should you think, Joseph, if I were to tell you that
I had seen Margaret before she came to your place?"

"Seen Margaret?" I repeated.

"Yes," he replied; "and I will tell you where. You see, when I found
mother was dead, and nobody cared whether I went up or down in the
world, that I turned downwards. I got with a bad set,--learned to drink
and gamble. One night, in the streets of Boston, I got into a quarrel
with a young man, a stranger. We were both drunk. I don't remember doing
it, but they told me afterwards that I stabbed him. This sobered us
both. He was laid on a bed in an upper room in the Lamb Tavern. I was
awfully frightened, thinking he would die. That was about two months
before I shipped aboard the Eliza Ann.

"After his wound was dressed, he begged me to go for his sister, and
gave me the street and number. His name was Arthur Holden. His sister
was your Margaret. Our acquaintance began at his bedside. We took turns
in the care of him.

"They were a family well off in the world, with nothing to trouble them
but his wickedness. He would not be respectable, would go with bad
company.

"After he was well enough to be taken home, I never saw Margaret until
that morning after the snow-storm. I was very eager to go for her, for I
felt sure, from what Mr. Nathaniel had said during the night, that she
was the same.

"Riding along, she told me all about Arthur's course, and the grief he
had caused them ever since. It had made her mother ill. He was roaming
about the country, always in trouble, and it was on his account that she
stayed behind, when her father and mother went South. She said he must
have some one to befriend him in case of need.

"And here," continued he, "was where I took a wrong step. I begged
Margaret not to speak of our former acquaintance. I could not bear to
have you all know. I was afraid Mary would despise me, she was so pure.

"Margaret was willing to keep silence about it, for she would rather not
have the people know of her brother. He would have been the talk of the
neighborhood. Everybody would have been pitying her. She used to like to
speak of him to me, because I was the only one who knew the
circumstances.

"But don't think," he continued, earnestly, "that I would have married
M