and I
will trust you for her sake. We are ruined."

"How, sir? How is that possible, with all your property?"

"Not one cent of my property--not a foot of ground, or a single brick,
or piece of shafting in the mills--belongs to me."

"This is terrible, sir. How did it happen?"

"It is a short and sad story. I was my father's only child, and there
were no other heirs. My father's last illness was very sudden, and he
left no will. He told me when he died that he had left everything to me.
We never found any will that would bear out this assertion. However,
the ordinary process of law gave me the property, and I thought myself
secure. Suddenly a will was found, in which all the property was left to
a distant relative in New York, and I was merely mentioned with some
trifling gift. I contested the will and lost the case. It was an
undoubted will, and in my father's own handwriting, and dated more than
a year before he died and when I was rusticating from college. I thought
I must needs sow my wild oats, and day after to-morrow I pay for them
all by total beggary. The devisee, by the will, acted very strangely
about the property. He did not disturb me for a very long time. He
probably feared to do so; and then he made a mortgage of one hundred
thousand dollars on the property, took the money, and went abroad."

"And he left you here in possession?"

"Yes. The interest on the mortgage became due. There was no one to pay
it, and they even had the effrontery to come to me. I refused again and
again, and every time the interest was added to the mortgage till it
rolled up to an enormous amount. Meanwhile the devisee died, penniless,
in Europe, and on Wednesday Abrams, the lawyer who holds the mortgage,
is to take possession of everything--and we--we are to go--I know not
whither."

For a few moments there was a profound silence in the room. The elder
man mourned his dreadful fate, and the son of science was ready to shout
for joy. Restraining himself with an effort, he said, not without a
tremor in his voice:

"And have you searched for any other will?"

"That is an idle question, my son. We have searched these years. Then,
too, just as I need a staff for my declining years, it breaks under me."

"You refer to Mr. Belford, sir?"

"Yes. Since I injured my foot in the mill, I have trusted all my
affairs to him, and now I sometimes think he is playing me false. Even
now, when all this trouble has come upon me, he is abs