ends to be
my guardian angel, and save me from evil for all the rest of my life."

"Can't you tell her all about your solemn engagement to Miss Phillips?"

"My engagement to Miss Phillips? Why, man alive, she knows that as well
as you do."

"Knows it! How did she find it out?"

"How? Why I told her myself."

"The deuce you did!"

Jack was silent.

"Well, then," said I, after some further thought, "why not tell her
every thing?"

"Tell her every thing?"

"Yes--exactly what you've been telling me. Make a clean breast of it."

Jack looked at me for some time with a curious expression.

"My dear boy," said he, at length, "do you mean to say that you are
really in earnest in making that proposition?"

"Most solemnly in earnest," said I.

"Well," said Jack, "it shows how mistaken I was in leaving any thing to
your imagination. You do not seem to understand," he continued,
dolefully, "or you will not understand that, when a fellow has
committed himself to a lady as I did, and squeezed her hand with such
peculiar ardor, in his efforts to save himself and do what's right, he
often overdoes it. You don't seem to suspect that I might have overdone
it with the widow. Now, unfortunately, that is the very thing that I
did. I did happen to overdo it most confoundedly. And so the melancholy
fact remains that, if I were to repeat to her, verbatim, all that I've
been telling you, she would find an extraordinary discrepancy between
such statements and those abominably tender confessions in which I
indulged on that other occasion. Nothing would ever convince her that I
was not sincere at that time; and how can I go to her now and confess
that I am a humbug and an idiot? I don't see it. Come, now, old fellow,
what do you think of that? Don't you call it rather a tough situation?
Do you think a man can see his way out of it? Own up, now. Don't you
think it's about the worst scrape you ever heard of? Come, now, no
humbug."

The fellow seemed actually to begin to feel a dismal kind of pride in
the very hopelessness of his situation, and looked at me with a gloomy
enjoyment of my discomfiture.

For my part, I said nothing, and for the best of reasons: I had nothing
to say. So I took refuge in shaking my head.

"You see," Jack persisted, "there's no help for it. Nobody can do any
thing. There's only one thing, and that you haven't suggested."

"What's that?" I asked, feebly.

Jack put the tip of his forefinger to his fore