told me your grounds for concluding so."

"Suppose a child had been crying and fretting after his mother for a
spoonful of jam," said the minister, quite gravely, "and at last she set
him down to a whole pot--what would you say to that?"

"I should say she meant to give him a sharp lesson, perhaps a reproof as
well--certainly not that she meant to cast him off," answered Wingfold,
laughing. "But still I do not understand."

"Have you not heard then? Didn't Dorothy tell you?"

"She has told me nothing."

"Not that my old uncle has left me a hundred thousand pounds and more?"

The curate was on the point of saying, "I am very glad to hear it,"
when the warning Dorothy had given him returned to his mind, and with it
the fear that the pastor was under a delusion--that, as a rich man is
sometimes not unnaturally seized with the mania of imagined poverty, so
this poor man's mental barometer had, from excess of poverty, turned its
index right round again to riches.

"Oh!" he returned, lightly and soothingly, "perhaps it is not so bad as
that. You may have been misinformed. There may be some mistake."

"No, no!" returned the minister; "it is true, every word of it. You
shall see the lawyers' letter. Dorothy has it, I think. My uncle was an
ironmonger in a country town, got on, and bought a little bit of land in
which he found iron. I knew he was flourishing, but he was a churchman
and a terrible Tory, and I never dreamed he would remember me. There had
been no communication between our family and his for many years. He must
have fancied me still a flourishing London minister, with a rich wife!
If he had had a suspicion of how sorely I needed a few pounds, I can not
believe he would have left me a farthing. He did not save his money to
waste it on bread and cheese, I can fancy him saying."

Although a look almost of despair kept coming and going upon his face,
he lay so still, and spoke so quietly and collectedly, that Wingfold
began to wonder whether there might not be some fact in his statement.
He did not well know what to say.

"When I heard the news from Dorothy--she read the letter first," Mr.
Drake went on, "--old fool that I was I was filled with such delight
that, although I could not have said whether I believed or not, the very
idea of the thing made me weep. Alas! Mr. Wingfold, I have had visions
of God in which the whole world would not have seemed worth a salt tear!
And now!--I jumped out of bed, and hur