uplicity or deceit capable of easy
explanation; it would probably have had no lasting effect on any but a
diseased mind; and, knowing him as well as I did, I could understand
how, with his reserved temperament and in his wounded pride, my father
would silently withdraw himself from his wife, nor deign to stoop so far
as to seek an explanation. I could discern only too clearly that he had
taken as proof of dissimulation some circumstance that would only appear
suspicious until the opportunity for explanation had passed away for
ever--hence the unhappiness of which I had gained an inkling during my
nursery days--and that it was probably not until his heart had been
softened by bereavement that he had coolly and dispassionately enough
reviewed the circumstances to arrive at the conclusion that he might,
after all, have been mistaken. My father had written of his "doubts and
misgivings," and I felt confident that it was nothing in the world but
the tenacious hold of these doubts and misgivings upon his mind which
had in the first instance made him so unfatherly in his treatment of me,
and had now reduced him almost to a condition of insanity. It was the
horrible uncertainty which was killing him, soul and body--the
uncertainty whether, on the one hand, his suspicions had been well
founded; or whether, on the other hand, he had been hideously cruel and
unjust to the one being who, above all others, ought to have been the
object of his most tender solicitude. _I_ had no doubt whatever upon
the subject; there was a conviction, amounting to absolute certainty in
my mind, that my unhappy father had all too easily allowed himself to be
deceived, and I there and then solemnly vowed and resolved that
henceforward it should be the great object and aim of my life to
demonstrate this to him to the point of positive conviction. "Yes," I
exclaimed, springing to my feet with renewed hope, "I had already one
incentive--my love for Inez--to spur me forward to great and noble
achievements: I have now another--the justification of my dead mother's
memory; and henceforward these shall be the twin stars to guide me
onward in my career. `For Love and Honour' shall be my motto; and, with
these two for guerdon, what may a man not dare and do?"

An hour later saw me back in Kingston and comfortably ensconced in the
bay-window of a private room in the--hotel, inditing a long epistle to
my father in collective reply to the entire budget I had t