"You tempt me sorely," said Mr. P. Foreman. "My daughter is ordered abroad for her health, ar 1 I have no means to take her."
"You have means here, at your hand. Take the money—it is yours; I give it to you freely. No one will be the wiser, and you will be an instrument in the hands of Providence to save two innocent lives!"
"Let me think a moment," said Mr. P. Foreman, and he turned his head. Arthur awaited his decision in an agony of despair. Presently he spoke again. "I will express no opinion of your guilt or innocence, but you have offered what I cannot resist. I will take the money, and will keep your secret, for the sake of the lady you are about to marry, for the sake of my poor daughter. It may be the means of restoring her to health. As for this brooch—"
Take it," cried Arthur, impetuously, "and do what you will with it. It is one of my conditions. Heaven bless you—Heaven bless you!"
"Take the money—it is yours!"
"We are accomplices in a transaction that must not be spoken of," said Mr. P. Foreman, who had put the money and the brooch into his pocket. "I pity and despise you, as I pity and despise myself."
He did not wish Arthur good night; seemingly ashamed of the bargain they had made, he went downstairs, accompanied by Arthur, who closed the street door upon him.
Dazed and bewildered, the young man returned to his room, and with great throbbings of his breast at the mysterious danger he had escaped, completed his preparations for the wedding and the honeymoon. Before he threw himself upon his bed in the vain attempt to seek oblivion for an hour or two, he wrote a letter to his friend Jack Stevens, saying he had unfortunately lost the money that had been lent to him, and begging for another loan, which was to be forwarded to a hotel in Paris where he intended to stop with his young wife for a few days.
There is no need to describe the wedding. Everything passed off well, and everybody in church declared they had never seen a lovelier bride; but they observed, at the same time, that the bridegroom appeared far from happy, and one of the spectators remarked that he looked several times over his shoulder, with the air of a man who feared that a ghost was standing behind him. His own people and his relatives, being in a state of excitement, did not take the same view of it; they said he was nervous, which was quite natural on such an occasion. Adelaide was tremblingly happy, and she and her lover-husband departed on their honeymoon amid the usual showers of rice and hurling of old slippers. In Paris, Arthur received from Jack Stevens a draft for another hundred and fifty pounds; but in the letter which accompanied the welcome draft Jack said he could not understand how Arthur had managed to lose the money. "I saw you," wrote Jack, "put the money in the side pocket of your dress coat, and button your overcoat over it. How could you have lost it? Did you have an adventure, and are you keeping it from me? Make a clean breast of it, old fellow. I should like to know. And if there is anything I can do for you while you are away, do not fail to call upon me. I am in London for good, and am entirely at your service." Arthur pondered over this letter, and pondered deeply, also, over the events which had occurred on the night
