"Mrs. Dunbar?--who is she? What! that crazy housekeeper? She looks as though she may have just been released from some lunatic asylum."
Wiggins made no immediate reply, and sat for a few moments in thought. Then he looked at Leon and said:
"Well, you have got hold of a part of the truth--just enough to mislead you. It is true that I have been in Australia, though why you should suppose that I was a convict I do not know. More: I went out there on account of Dalton, and for no other reason. While there I saw much of him, and gained his whole confidence. He told me his whole story unreservedly. He believed me to be his friend. He confided every thing to me. You must have heard of his trial, and his strange persistence in refusing to say who the guilty party was."
"Oh yes," said Leon, with a laugh. "A good idea that, when the guilty party was himself."
"It was not himself," said Wiggins, "and before long the world shall know who it was, for that is the one business of my life since my return, to which I have sacrificed all other concerns. In my attention to this I have even neglected Miss Dalton."
"She does not appear to think that you have neglected her," said Leon, with a sneer.
"Dalton," said he, "told me all before he died. He thought of his daughter, and though he had suffered himself, yet he thought on his death-bed that it would be a sin to leave to her such a legacy of shame. It was this that broke his obstinate silence, and made him tell his secret to me. And here, Leon Dudleigh, is a thing in which you are concerned.
"I!" exclaimed Leon, in astonishment, not unmingled with alarm.
"I will tell you presently. I will simply remark now that I am following out his wishes, and am working for Miss Dalton, as he himself would have worked, to redeem her name."
"She seems to give you a precious hard time of it too, I should say, and does not altogether appreciate your self-denying and wonderfully disinterested efforts."
"I have not treated her with sufficient consideration," said Wiggins. "I misunderstood her character. I began altogether wrong. I see now that I ought to have given her more of my confidence, or, better yet, that I ought not to have brought her here till the work was done. Well," he added, with a sigh, "my chief consolation is that it will be all right in the end."