For my own sake I will respect your confidence.'
'Young sir, I like you better than ever. Had you said that you would
respect it because it was a confidence, I should have mistrusted you,
for doubtless you feel that secrets communicated so readily have
no claim to be held sacred. Nor have they, but when their violation
involves the sad and accidental end of the violator, it is another
matter. Well now, do you accept?'
'I accept.'
'Good. Your baggage I suppose is at the inn. I will send porters to
discharge your score and bring it here. No need for you to go, nephew,
let us stop and drink another glass of wine; the sooner we grow intimate
the better, nephew.'
It was thus that first I became acquainted with Senor Andres de Fonseca,
my benefactor, the strangest man whom I have ever known. Doubtless any
person reading this history would think that I, the narrator, was sowing
a plentiful crop of troubles for myself in having to deal with him,
setting him down as a rogue of the deepest, such as sometimes, for their
own wicked purposes, decoy young men to crime and ruin. But it was not
so, and this is the strangest part of the strange story. All that Andres
de Fonseca told me was true to the very letter.
He was a gentleman of great talent who had been rendered a little mad
by misfortunes in his early life. As a physician I have never met his
master, if indeed he has one in these times, and as a man versed in the
world and more especially in the world of women, I have known none to
compare with him.
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