scruple.  Then I fell in with Demetrius Hermann.  How can I tell the story?  How he seemed to me the wisest and acutest of human beings, the very man to assist in the discovery, and how I betrayed to him enough by my questions to make him think me a prize, both for my secret and my fortune.  He says I deceived him.  Perhaps I did.  Any way, we are quits.  No, not quite, for I loved him as I should not have thought it in me to love anyone, and the very joy and gladness of the sensation made me see with his eyes, or else be preposterously blind.  I think his southern imagination made his expectations of the secret unreasonable, and I followed his bidding blindly and implicitly in my two attempts to bring off Magnum Bonum, which I had come to believe my right, unjustly withheld from me.  The second attempt, as you know, ended in the general crash.

“Afterwards, all the overtures were made by my husband.  I would not share in them.  I was too proud and would not come as a beggar, or see him threaten and cringe as unhappily I knew he could do, nor would I be seen by my mother or brothers.  I knew they would begin to pity me, and I could not brook that.  My mother’s assurance of exposure, if he made any use of the stolen secret, made Demetrius choose to go to America.

“He said it all came out before my military brother.  Did that change Lucas’s destination?” said Janet, looking up.

“Ask him?”

“No, indeed,” said Jock, when he understood.  “I turned doctor as the readiest way of looking after mother.”

“Did you understand nothing?”

“Only that she had some memoranda of my father’s, that the sc—- that Hermann wanted.  I never thought of them again till she told me.”

Mrs. Brownlow started at the next few words.

“My child was born only two days after we landed at New York.”

But a quick interrogative glance kept her silent.  “She was very small and delicate, and her father was impatient both of her weakness and mine.  I think that was when I began to long for my mother.  He made me call her Glykera, after his mother.  I had taught him to be bitter against mine.”

“O mother, if you could have seen her,” suddenly exclaimed Janet, “she was the dearest little thing,” and she drew from her bosom a locket with a baby face on one side, and some soft hair on the other, put it into her mother’s hand and hid her face on her shoulder.

“Oh! my poor Janet, you have suffered indeed!  How long did you keep the little darling?”

“Two years.  You will hear!  I was not quite wretched while I had her.  Go on, mother.  There’s no talking of it.”