Oh, Uncle George, why not have told your secret to your old playmate?
Why leave him to find you _here ?_ The priest raised me gently, and begged me to go with him into his own house.

On our way there, I mentioned persons and places that I thought my uncle might have spoken of, in order to satisfy my companion that I was really the person I represented myself to be.

By the time we had entered his little parlor, and had sat down alone in it, we were almost like old friends together.
I thought it best that I should begin by telling all that I have related here on the subject of Uncle George, and his disappearance from home.

My host listened with a very sad face, and said, when I had done: "I can understand your anxiety to know what I am authorized to tell you, but pardon me if I say first that there are circumstances in your uncle's story which it may pain you to hear--" He stopped suddenly.
"Which it may pain me to hear as a nephew ?" I asked.
"No," said the priest, looking away from me, "as a son." I gratefully expressed my sense of the delicacy and kindness which had prompted my companion's warning, but I begged him, at the same time, to keep me no longer in suspense and to tell me the stern truth, no matter how painfully it might affect me as a listener.
"In telling me all you knew about what you term the Family Secret," said the priest, "you have mentioned as a strange coincidence that your sister's death and your uncle's disappearance took place at the same time.

Did you ever suspect what cause it was that occasioned your sister's death ?" "I only knew what my father told me, an d what all our friends believed--that she had a tumor in the neck, or, as I sometimes heard it stated, from the effect on her constitution of a tumor in the neck." "She died under an operation for the removal of that tumor," said the priest, in low tones; "and the operator was your Uncle George." In those few words all the truth burst upon me.
"Console yourself with the thought that the long martyrdom of his life is over," the priest went on.