"Have not you confessed under your own name?"

"No," replied Raymond, with a curious remnant of that pride of race at which it is the undisputed privilege of low birth and a plebeian temperament to sneer. "I won't have my own name dragged in. I dropped it years ago. I've confessed as Stephens, and I'll die and be buried as Stephens. I'm not going to disgrace the family."

There was a constrained silence of some minutes.

"Would you like to see your sister?" asked Charles; but Raymond shook his head with feeble decision.

"That man!" he said, suddenly, after a long pause. "That man in the door-way! How did he come there?"

"There is no man in the door-way," said Charles, reassuringly. "There is no one here but me."

"Last night," continued Raymond, "last night in the stables. I watched him stand in the door-way."

Charles remembered how Dare had said Raymond had bolted out past him.

"That was Dare," he said; "the man who was to have been your brother-in-law."

"Ah!" said Raymond with evident unconcern. "I thought I'd seen him before. But he's altered. He's grown into a man. So he is to marry Ruth, is he?"