nephew?" I asked.

"No," said the priest, looking away from me, "as a son."

I gratefully expressed my sense of the delicacy and kindness which had
prompted my companion's warning, but I begged him, at the same time, to
keep me no longer in suspense and to tell me the stern truth, no matter
how painfully it might affect me as a listener.

"In telling me all you knew about what you term the Family Secret,"
said the priest, "you have mentioned as a strange coincidence that your
sister's death and your uncle's disappearance took place at the same
time. Did you ever suspect what cause it was that occasioned your
sister's death?"

"I only knew what my father told me, an d what all our friends
believed--that she had a tumor in the neck, or, as I sometimes heard it
stated, from the effect on her constitution of a tumor in the neck."

"She died under an operation for the removal of that tumor," said the
priest, in low tones; "and the operator was your Uncle George."

In those few words all the truth burst upon me.

"Console yourself with the thought that the long martyrdom of his life
is over," the priest went on. "He rests; he is at peace. He and his
little darling understand each other, and are happy now. That thought
bore him up to the last on his death-bed. He always spoke of your sister
as his 'little darling.' He firmly believed that she was waiting to
forgive and console him in the other world--and who shall say he was
deceived in that belief?"

Not I! Not anyone who has ever loved and suffered, surely!

"It was out of the depths of his self-sacrificing love for the child
that he drew the fatal courage to undertake the operation," continued
the priest. "Your father naturally shrank from attempting it. His
medical brethren whom he consulted all doubted the propriety of taking
any measures for the removal of the tumor, in the particular condition
and situation of it when they were called in. Your uncle alone differed
with them. He was too modest a man to say so, but your mother found
it out. The deformity of her beautiful child horrified her. She was
desperate enough to catch at the faintest hope of remedying it that
anyone might hold out to her; and she persuaded your uncle to put his
opinion to the proof. Her horror at the deformity of the child, and her
despair at the prospect of its lasting for life, seem to have utterly
blinded her to all natural sense of the danger of the operation. It
is hard to know how t