e had at heart. "Well? How speeds the matter?"

Mr. Caryll's face became overcast. He sat down, a thought wearily.

"So far as Lord Ostermore is concerned, it speeds--as you would wish it.
So far as I am concerned"--he paused and sighed--"I would that it sped
not at all, or that I was out of it."

Sir Richard looked at him with searching eyes. "How?" he asked. "What
would you have me understand?"

"That in spite of all that has been said between us, in spite of all the
arguments you have employed, and with which once, for a little while,
you convinced me, this task is loathsome to me in the last degree.
Ostermore is my father, and I can't forget it."

"And your mother?" Sir Richard's tone was sad, rather than indignant;
it spoke of a bitter disappointment, not at the events, but at this man
whom he loved with all a father's love.

"It were idle to go over it all again. I know everything that you
would--that you could--say. I have said it all to myself again and
again, in a vain endeavor to steel myself to the business to which you
plighted me. Had Ostermore been different, perhaps it had been easier.
I cannot say. As it is, I see in him a weakling, a man of inferior
intellect, who does not judge things as you and I judge them, whose
life cannot have been guided by the rules that serve for men of stronger
purpose."

"You find excuses for him? For his deed?" cried Sir Richard, and his
voice was full of horror now; he stared askance at his adoptive son.

"No, no! Oh, I don't know. On my soul and conscience, I don't know!"
cried Mr. Caryll, like one in pain. He rose and moved restlessly about
the room. "No," he pursued more calmly, "I don't excuse him. I blame
him--more bitterly than you can think; perhaps more bitterly even than
do you, for I have had a look into his mind and see the exact place held
there by my mother's memory. I can judge and condemn him; but I can't
execute him; I can't betray him. I don't think I could do it even if he
were not my father."

He paused, and leaning his hands upon the table at which Sir Richard
sat, he faced him, and spoke in a voice of earnest pleading. "Sir
Richard, this was not the task to give me; or, if you had planned to
give it me, you should have reared me differently; you should not have
sought to make of me a gentleman. You have brought me up to principles
of honor, and you ask me now to outrage them, to cast them off, and to
become a very Judas. Is't wonderful I shoul