"Yes, yes; I remember. What are you boring me with all this for?"
"Kindly have patience and you will see. One of his invariable habits was to visit every Sunday the old red prison in the woods beyond your house."
Miss Gastonguay's head suddenly became more erect, though her fingers trifled nervously with her handkerchief.
"I was often his companion. Among the prisoners I had many acquaintances. My father taught me not to despise these men whose unhappy lives had flung them for a time into such a place—"
"He was wrong," said Miss Gastonguay, angrily. "Wrong—wrong."
"Just before my father's death, he called me to his bedside, and told me that in leaving the world he had a sacred trust to impose on me. I would in his place be entrusted with the custody, the loaning, exchange, or issue of money for a certain individual whom I might hear from or see only at long intervals. This person I was to serve faithfully, without curiosity or suspicion, except in the improbable event of my being required to do anything that would be against my conscience."
"Conscience!" ejaculated Miss Gastonguay. "You Puritans worship your consciences."
"I accepted the trust," said Justin, "and I have kept it."
"For some prison bird," she said, dilating her nostrils. "Your father always was soft-hearted. He believed a kind whisper in the ear would reform the prince of darkness himself."
"It was four years after my father's death," continued Justin, "before I saw this stranger for whom my father was a kind of agent—"