wn to hours; that I might pass away at any moment now, and
had therefore best attend to any necessary business that I might wish
to settle.

"This warning admonishes me to finish and close my letter. I end as I
began, by swearing to you, by all the hopes of salvation in a dying
woman, that Archibald Scott is your own son. You can prove this to your
own satisfaction by coming to San Vito and examining the church register
as to the dates of his birth, baptism, and so forth; by which you will
find that he was born just five months after I left your roof, and just
six months after our return from our long yachting cruise, and the
renewal of my acquaintance with Count de Volaski, at the British
minister's dinner. You see, by these circumstances, there cannot be
even the shadow of a doubt as to his true parentage.

"I repeat, that I have not told the boy the secret of his birth; to have
done so might have been to have embittered his mind against you, and I
would not on my death-bed do anything to sow enmity between father and
son.

"I leave to yourself to tell him, if you should ever think proper to do
so, and with what explanations you may please to add.

"I have constituted you his sole guardian, and trustee of the moderate
property I bequeath him. He wishes to enter the army, and he will have
money sufficient to purchase a commission and support himself respectably
in some good regiment. I hope that when the proper time comes you will
forward his ambition in this direction.

"And so I leave him in your hands, for my feeble strength fails, and I
can only add my name.

CHAPTER XLII.

HER SON.

The last lines of this sad letter were almost illegible in their
faintness and irregularity; and the tangled skein of light scratches that
stood proxy for a signature could never have been deciphered by the skill
of man.

The Duke of Hereward had grown ten years older in the half hour he
had spent in the perusal of this fatal letter. He was no longer only
sixty-five years of age, and a "fine old English gentleman;" he seemed
fully seventy-five years old, and a broken, decrepit, ruined man. In
fact, the first blow had fallen upon that fine intellect whose subsequent
eccentricities gained for him the sobriquet of the mad duke.

The hand that held the fatal letter fell heavily by his side; his head
drooped upon his chest; he did not move or speak for many minutes.

His young visitor watched him with curiosity and int