When I'd done fixing him, I gave another rap with my paper-knife on the table to startle him up a bit.

Then I went on.
"From what you have been stating up to the present time," says I, "I gather that you are in a scrape which is likely to interfere seriously with your marriage on Wednesday ?" (He nodded, and I cut in again before he could say a word): "The scrape affects your young lady, and goes back to the period of a transaction in which her late father was engaged, doesn't it ?" (He nods, and I cut in once more): "There is a party, who turned up after seeing the announcement of your marriage in the paper, who is cognizant of what he oughtn't to know, and who is prepared to use his knowledge of the same to the prejudice of the young lady and of your marriage, unless he receives a sum of money to quiet him?
Very well.

Now, first of all, Mr.Frank, state what you have been told by the young lady herself about the transaction of her late father.

How did you first come to have any knowledge of it ?" "She was talking to me about her father one day so tenderly and prettily, that she quite excited my interest about him," begins Mr.
Frank; "and I asked her, among other things, what had occasioned his death.

She said she believed it was distress of mind in the first instance; and added that this distress was connected with a shocking secret, which she and her mother had kept from everybody, but which she could not keep from me, because she was determined to begin her married life by having no secrets from her husband." Here Mr.Frank began to get sentimental again, and I pulled him up short once more with the paper-knife.
"She told me," Mr.Frank went on, "that the great mistake of her father's life was his selling out of the army and taking to the wine trade.