pers, for it is no favor that I am
doing you, but simply a restoration of stolen property."

"How's that, ma'am?"

"I am just going to explain, though you might take a lady's word for
it without asking any questions. Now, what I am going to say is just
between you four, and must go no farther. I have my own reasons for
wishing to keep it from the police. Who do you think it was who struck
me last night, Admiral?"

"Some villain, ma'am. I don't know his name."

"But I do. It was the same man who ruined or tried to ruin your son. It
was my only brother, Jeremiah."

"Ah!"

"I will tell you about him--or a little about him, for he has done much
which I would not care to talk of, nor you to listen to. He was always
a villain, smooth-spoken and plausible, but a dangerous, subtle villain
all the same. If I have some hard thoughts about mankind I can trace
them back to the childhood which I spent with my brother. He is my only
living relative, for my other brother, Charles's father, was killed in
the Indian mutiny.

"Our father was rich, and when he died he made a good provision both for
Jeremiah and for me. He knew Jeremiah and he mistrusted him, however; so
instead of giving him all that he meant him to have he handed me over a
part of it, telling me, with what was almost his dying breath, to hold
it in trust for my brother, and to use it in his behalf when he should
have squandered or lost all that he had. This arrangement was meant to
be a secret between my father and myself, but unfortunately his words
were overheard by the nurse, and she repeated them afterwards to my
brother, so that he came to know that I held some money in trust for
him. I suppose tobacco will not harm my head, Doctor? Thank you, then I
shall trouble you for the matches, Ida." She lit a cigarette, and leaned
back upon the pillow, with the blue wreaths curling from her lips.

"I cannot tell you how often he has attempted to get that money from me.
He has bullied, cajoled, threatened, coaxed, done all that a man could
do. I still held it with the presentiment that a need for it would come.
When I heard of this villainous business, his flight, and his leaving
his partner to face the storm, above all that my old friend had been
driven to surrender his income in order to make up for my brother's
defalcations, I felt that now indeed I had a need for it. I sent in
Charles yesterday to Mr. McAdam, and his client, upon hearing the facts
of the case, v