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'It was his wont, it seems, to do all things by proxy,' answered the other coldly, even to the discharge of his just debts.'

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'He suffered, sir, for all he did amiss; ay,' added Raymond, with sudden sternness, and he was tricked, imposed upon. I see now how you plotted against him; made his name infamous, and wrecked his peace. It was you, then, and not your ghost, who met him face to face in Westminster. Revenge is sweet to you; you should therefore be well satisfied; for it was you who killed him.' Was it so, indeed? Alas, alas! and he was once my friend,' murmured Conway with drooping head. 'Be patient, Raymond. You cannot guess the things that I have suffered-and all wrongfully. Your father also has killed me. These grey hairs, these hollow eyes, this shrunken frame, and worse, the changed and hardened heart within me, are all his doing, England not to right myself, but her you love. despoiled beyond the reach of righting, I had no sense of right but that. What was I to do? Would you have had me appeal to him who let me perish (as he imagined) in his stead, and kept back the money for which I had sold my life-for justice? There was no justice in him.'

'Captain Conway, I was his son.'

I came back to Broken, betrayed,

'I feel that, unhappy lad! but you have compelled me to speak in my own defence. Listen awhile, but not to the record of your father's shame. Let that be buried in his grave and mine. My purpose in sending for you here is to avert the miseries that have fallen upon him and me, from you and yours; to confine the evil that has destroyed us both to our own generation.'

The speaker paused for breath, and held his finger up for silence: but there was no fear of interruption from his companion now. A spark had fallen among the dead embers of his dearest hope, which it seemed to him that a word of his might extinguish.

"Your father left me at Dhulang a prisoner doomed to death, as certainly, as it appeared, as it is certain now. I had no hope of life, and few regrets for it. The people about me, from the highest to the lowest, were cruel, base, and brutal. There was only one man, Fu-chow-his name was mentioned to you, perhaps?'

Raymond motioned with his head that he knew the man.

"You were told, doubtless, that he was vile and false as all the rest, and so I then believed him to be. He had been friendly to me at first, but when I exchanged places with your father, he had insisted on being bought over like the rest to acquiesce in the substitution. Indeed, he was more obstinate than the others, and stood out for better terms, and we had no choice but to accede to

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them. No sooner had your father sailed, however, than this man came to me and showed himself my friend. I had done him a service-no matter what-and barbarian as he was, it seems, he was grateful for it. He had influence, he was free, he had money, and more than the average cunning of his race, and he was inclined to save me, and he told me so. I thanked him, but the thing appeared impossible: we had tried every plan already, as I reminded him, and the execution was fixed for the next day but one.

"I have got a substitute," said he, "who will suffer for you." "I think in no case would I have consented to such an arrange · ment, though the desire of life had begun to stir within me as he spoke those words. It was of no use to speak of scruples to the man, but I simply said that no Chinese could be mistaken for me for an instant.

""I know it," said he. "It is not a Chinese; it is an Englishman."

'I could scarcely believe him, but at all events I could never have permitted the sacrifice of a fellow-countryman in my place. Forgive me, Raymond; I do not blame those that would; life is dearer to some men, Heaven knows, than to others; and mine seemed of little value. I said that that could not be.

“But this Englishman," said Fu-chow, "must suffer in any case, and the self-same punishment. It is the murderer we saw in prison as we came along."

Then I remembered that we had visited a Chinese prison some hundred miles away, in which lay an English criminal condemned like me-but for most heinous crimes-to the Ling-chih, i.e. to be cut into ten thousand pieces. It seemed, indeed, since the poor wretch must suffer, that I should be doing him no wrong to exchange places with him.

"But the man is in gaol," said I, "and distant three days' journey."

"No, master, he is on his road, and will be here to-morrow," said Fu-chow cunningly. And indeed he had so contrived it. He had taken a dislike to your father-for which, in truth, he had his reasons and though he had all along had this device to rescue him in his mind, and had even put it in train, he had not intended to tell him of it till the last moment.'

'Great Heaven! then my father's life might have been saved without this shame!' cried Raymond bitterly.

'Perhaps. Let us not dwell, however, on what might have been; evil enough has befallen us, without adding to it by vain regrets. My task is to stop its growth beyond my grave. The man I speak of arrived at Dhulang the next morning, and on the same night I

VOL. XXXV. NO. CXXXIX,

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left the prison accompanied by Fu-chow. Not then, but afterwards, I redeemed your father's signet-ring from the custody of the gaoler, who had robbed him of it, intending to restore it to him under far other circumstances than afterwards took place. I was carried away up the country, and lay in hiding for many weeks. It would have compromised the officials as well as hazarded my own life to let it be known that I was still in existence. I suffered very great hardships, but my greatest pain was the reflection that by that time my dear daughter must have heard of my death, and be enduring-for I knew she loved me well-the pangs of a grief for which there was no need. I took it for granted that she had received news of her worldly prosperity; that your father had telegraphed to her the provisions of the will I had executed, and which was to account (as he and I had agreed upon together) for her change of fortune, but I felt that riches would not compensate her for her father's loss. I was right there-or rather, I should have been, had circumstances turned out as I had shaped them: but I was cruelly deceiving myself, as you know, in the other matter.

'It was stipulated by the Mandarin who had connived at my escape that I should not return to Shanghai, or reveal myself to any of my fellow-countrymen while in China; and it was very easy to maintain my incognito. The privations I had endured, the agonies of mind I had undergone, had greatly altered me, though I had not as yet become the wretched object that you see here. On the other hand, my spirit was not broken: I was going home at last to see my darling child in the prosperity which I had earned for her. For the money, as you are aware, was to be paid for the risk I ran, and not for the sacrifice of my life itself, though indeed the risk and death seemed one. Fu-chow, faithful to the last, furnished me with funds sufficient to pay my passage home in the steerage of an English steamer, and I took my berth in it under the name of Pearson, as a merchant's clerk. It was not for many days after we got to sea that I learnt that your father had not fulfilled his solemn promise given to me on that prison pallet, far more terrible than any death-bed. The catastrophe at Dhulang was a frequent subject of conversation on board, but I had kept aloof from my fellow-passengers, and it was quite by chance that I heard how "that poor devil Conway" had left nothing behind him save his sad story.

That news, Raymond Pennicuick, seemed to take ten years from a life that I had good cause to know would in no case have been a long one. And yet I felt I must needs live on for my revenge. Food I could not take, but on the thoughts of that revenge I lived throughout that hateful voyage. You may see in me to what such diet brings a man.'

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