n the hands of the lawyers? Might it not be best
for her happiness that he should do so? He had been told that even
though he should not succeed, there might arise almost interminable
delay. The tailor would want his money before he married, and thus
she might be rescued from her degradation till she should be old
enough to understand it. And yet how could he claim that of which he
had said, now a score of times, that he knew that it was not his own?
Could he cease to call this girl by the name which all his people had
acknowledged as her own, because she had refused to be his wife; and
declare his conviction that she was base-born only because she had
preferred to his own the addresses of a low-born man, reeking with
the sweat of a tailor's board? No, he could not do that. Let her
marry but the sweeper of a crossing, and he must still call her Lady
Anna,--if he called her anything.

Something must be done, however. He had been told by the lawyers how
the matter might be made to right itself, if he and the young lady
could at once agree to be man and wife; but he had not been told what
would follow, should she decline to accept his offer. Mr. Flick and
the Solicitor-General must know how to shape their course before
November came round,--and would no doubt want all the time to shape
it that he could give them. What was he to say to Mr. Flick and to
the Solicitor-General? Was he at liberty to tell to them the secret
which the girl had told to him? That he was at liberty to say that
she had rejected his offer must be a matter of course; but might
he go beyond that, and tell them the whole story? It would be most
expedient for many reasons that they should know it. On her behalf
even it might be most salutary,--with that view of liberating her
from the grasp of her humiliating lover. But she had told it him,
against her own interests, at her own peril, to her own infinite
sorrow,--in order that she might thus allay hopes in which he would
otherwise have persevered. He knew enough of the little schemes and
by-ways of love, of the generosity and self-sacrifice of lovers, to
feel that he was bound to confidence. She had told him that if needs
were he might repeat her tale;--but she had told him at the same time
that her tale was a secret. He could not go with her secret to a
lawyer's chambers, and there divulge in the course of business that
which had been extracted from her by the necessity to which she had
submitted of set