he
good nature of his more lucky younger brother.

What a sad letter it seemed, read in that light. And how every word
drove the unhappy heir of Maxfield deeper and deeper into the slough of
perplexity.

Three weeks ago, when his dead father's letter had come into his hands,
he had not hesitated for a moment as to his duty or his desire in the
matter. He had cheerfully accepted the task of finding that lost,
aggrieved, perhaps hardly-used brother, to whom his heart went out as he
gazed on the likeness of what he once had been.

But now! To abdicate in favour of this blackguard. To look for him, to
tell him that Maxfield was his, to have to depend on his generosity for
a livelihood, to see the good name of Ingleton represented in the county
by a drunken profligate. What a task was that. The writer evidently
did not know of the second will, or suspect that after all Maxfield was
his own. No one knew of that document but Roger and Armstrong. For a
moment there returned to the boy's mind the words of his father's
letter--

"If after reading the papers you choose to destroy them, no one will
blame you; no one will know--you will do no one an injury. You are free
to act as you choose."

And Armstrong, the only other being who had seen the papers, had urged
him to avail himself of the permission thus accorded. Why not take the
advice and save Maxfield and the family name, and himself--ay, and
Rosalind--from the discredit that threatened. He could yet be generous,
beyond his hopes, to the prodigal. He would pay to get him abroad, to--
to--

A flush of shame mounted to the boy's cheeks as he suddenly discovered
himself listening to these unworthy suggestions.

"Heaven help me," he said, "to be a man." It was a brief inward fight,
though a sore one.

Roger Ingleton, weak in body, often dull of wit and infirm of temper,
had yet certain old-fashioned ideas of his own as to how it behoves a
gentleman to act.

He cherished, too, certain still older-fashioned ideas as to how when a
Christian gentleman wants help and courage he may obtain it. And he was
endowed with that glorious obstinacy which, when it once satisfies
itself on a question of right and wrong, declines to listen to argument.

Therefore when, later than usual, he joined the family party at
breakfast, it was with a grim sense of a misery ahead to be faced, but
by no manner of means to be avoided.

For fear the reader should be disposed to rank