“There is a party, who turned up after seeing the announcement of your marriage in the paper, who is cognizant of what he oughtn’t to know, and who is prepared to use his knowledge of the same to the prejudice of the young lady and of your marriage, unless he receives a sum of money to quiet him?  Very well.  Now, first of all, Mr. Frank, state what you have been told by the young lady herself about the transaction of her late father.  How did you first come to have any knowledge of it?”

“She was talking to me about her father one day so tenderly and prettily, that she quite excited my interest about him,” begins Mr. Frank; “and I asked her, among other things, what had occasioned his death.  She said she believed it was distress of mind in the first instance; and added that this distress was connected with a shocking secret, which she and her mother had kept from everybody, but which she could not keep from me, because she was determined to begin her married life by having no secrets from her husband.”  Here Mr. Frank began to get sentimental again, and I pulled him up short once more with the paper-knife.

“She told me,” Mr. Frank went on, “that the great mistake of her father’s life was his selling out of the army and taking to the wine trade.  He had no talent for business; things went wrong with him from the first.  His clerk, it was strongly suspected, cheated him—­”

“Stop a bit,” says I.  “What was that suspected clerk’s name?”

“Davager,” says he.

“Davager,” says I, making a note of it.  “Go on, Mr. Frank.”

“His affairs got more and more entangled,” says Mr. Frank; “he was pressed for money in all directions; bankruptcy, and consequent dishonor (as he considered it) stared him in the face.  His mind was so affected by his troubles that both his wife and daughter, toward the last, considered him to be hardly responsible for his own acts.  In this state of desperation and misery, he—­” Here Mr. Frank began to hesitate.

We have two ways in the law of drawing evidence off nice and clear from an unwilling client or witness.  We give him a fright, or we treat him to a joke.  I treated Mr. Frank to a joke.

“Ah!” says I, “I know what he did.  He had a signature to write; and, by the most natural mistake in the world, he wrote another gentleman’s name instead of his own—­eh?”

“It was to a bill,” says Mr. Frank, looking very crestfallen, instead of taking the joke.  “His principal creditor wouldn’t wait till he could raise the money, or the greater part of it.  But he was resolved, if he sold off everything, to get the amount and repay—­”

“Of course,” says I, “drop that.  The forgery was discovered.  When?”

“Before even the first attempt was made to negotiate the bill.  He had done the whole thing in the most absurdly and innocently wrong way.  The person whose name he had used was a stanch friend of his, and a relation of his wife’s—­a good man as well as a rich one.  He had influence with the chief creditor, and he used it nobly.  He had a real affection for the unfortunate man’s wife, and he proved it generously.”