business abilities, were
invaluable to Eustace.

Uncle and nephew saw little of each other. The visits of Eustace were
confined to a week in the summer or autumn: long weeks, that dragged
almost as slowly as the bath-chair in which the old man was drawn along
the sunny sea front. In their way the two men were fond of each other,
though their intimacy would doubtless have been greater had they shared
the same religious views. Adrian held to the old-fashioned evangelical
dogmas of his early manhood; his nephew for many years had been thinking
of embracing Buddhism. Both men possessed, too, the reticence the
Borlsovers had always shown, and which their enemies sometimes called
hypocrisy. With Adrian it was a reticence as to the things he had left
undone; but with Eustace it seemed that the curtain which he was so
careful to leave undrawn hid something more than a half-empty chamber.

* * * * *

Two years before his death Adrian Borlsover developed, unknown to
himself, the not uncommon power of automatic writing. Eustace made the
discovery by accident. Adrian was sitting reading in bed, the forefinger
of his left hand tracing the Braille characters, when his nephew noticed
that a pencil the old man held in his right hand was moving slowly along
the opposite page. He left his seat in the window and sat down beside
the bed. The right hand continued to move, and now he could see plainly
that they were letters and words which it was forming.

"Adrian Borlsover," wrote the hand, "Eustace Borlsover, George
Borlsover, Francis Borlsover, Sigismund Borlsover, Adrian Borlsover,
Eustace Borlsover, Saville Borlsover. B, for Borlsover. Honesty is the
Best Policy. Beautiful Belinda Borlsover."

"What curious nonsense!" said Eustace to himself.

"King George the Third ascended the throne in 1760," wrote the hand.
"Crowd, a noun of multitude; a collection of individuals--Adrian
Borlsover, Eustace Borlsover."

"It seems to me," said his uncle, closing the book, "that you had much
better make the most of the afternoon sunshine and take your walk now."

"I think perhaps I will," Eustace answered as he picked up the volume.
"I won't go far, and when I come back I can read to you those articles
in _Nature_ about which we were speaking."

He went along the promenade, but stopped at the first shelter, and
seating himself in the corner best protected from the wind, he examined
the book at leisure. Nearly ev