n object would seem amidst others
of price and rarity. And yet there it was, and, by the slip of paper
fastened to it, attesting a special notice.

With an effort almost convulsive he at last seized the knife, and reads
the words. They were simply these: "A penknife, of which Mr. Dunn can
probably supply the history." He dropped it as he read, and lay back,
with a sense of fainting sickness.

The men of action and energy can face the positive present perils
of life with a far bolder heart than they can summon to confront the
terrors of conscience-stricken imagination. In the one case danger
assumes a shape and a limit; in the other it looms out of distance,
vast, boundless, and full of mystery. She knew, then, the story of his
boyish shame; she had held the tale secretly in her heart through all
their intercourse, reading his nature, mayhap, through the clew of that
incident, and tracing out his path in life by the light it afforded;
doubtless, too, she knew of his last scene with her father,--that
terrible interview, wherein the dying man uttered a prediction that was
almost a curse: she had treasured up these memories, and accepted his
aid with seeming frankness, and yet, all the while that she played the
grateful, trusting dependant, she had been slowly pursuing a vengeance.
If Paul Kellett had confided to her the story of this childish
transgression, he had doubtless revealed to her how heavily it had been
avenged--how, with a persistent, persecuting hate, Dunn had tracked him,
through difficulty and debt, to utter ruin. She had therefore read him
in his real character, and had devoted herself to a revenge deeper than
his own. Ay, he was countermined!

Such was the turn of his thoughts, as he sat there wiping the cold sweat
that broke from his forehead, and cursing the blindness that had so
long deceived him; and he, whose deep craft had carried him triumphant
through all the hardest trials of the world, the man who had encountered
the most subtle intellects, the great adventurer in a whole ocean of
schemes, was to be the dupe and sport of a girl!

And now, amid his self-accusings, there rose up that strange attempt at
compromise the baffled heart so often clings to, that he had, at times,
half suspected this deep and secret treachery,--that she had not been
either so secret or so crafty as she fancied herself. "If my mind," so
reasoned he, "had not been charged with far weightier themes, I should
have detected