e young Rupert's face
for the unfolding of those historic curves and shades that the painters
Vandyke and Lely had perpetuated on canvas.

When the boy reached the most fascinating age of childhood, and his
shouts of laughter ran through Stapleford House from end to end, the
remorse that oppressed Timothy Petrick knew no bounds. Of all people in
the world this Rupert was the one on whom he could have wished the
estates to devolve; yet Rupert, by Timothy's own desperate strategy at
the time of his birth, had been ousted from all inheritance of them; and,
since he did not mean to remarry, the manors would pass to his brother
and his brother's children, who would be nothing to him, whose boasted
pedigree on one side would be nothing to his Rupert's.

Had he only left the first will of his grandfather alone!

His mind ran on the wills continually, both of which were in existence,
and the first, the cancelled one, in his own possession. Night after
night, when the servants were all abed, and the click of safety locks
sounded as loud as a crash, he looked at that first will, and wished it
had been the second and not the first.

The crisis came at last. One night, after having enjoyed the boy's
company for hours, he could no longer bear that his beloved Rupert should
be dispossessed, and he committed the felonious deed of altering the date
of the earlier will to a fortnight later, which made its execution appear
subsequent to the date of the second will already proved. He then boldly
propounded the first will as the second.

His brother Edward submitted to what appeared to be not only
incontestible fact, but a far more likely disposition of old Timothy's
property; for, like many others, he had been much surprised at the
limitations defined in the other will, having no clue to their cause. He
joined his brother Timothy in setting aside the hitherto accepted
document, and matters went on in their usual course, there being no
dispositions in the substituted will differing from those in the other,
except such as related to a future which had not yet arrived.

The years moved on. Rupert had not yet revealed the anxiously expected
historic lineaments which should foreshadow the political abilities of
the ducal family aforesaid when it happened on a certain day that Timothy
Petrick made the acquaintance of a well-known physician of Budmouth, who
had been the medical adviser and friend of the late Mrs. Petrick's family
for