a
provision which, in the event that you were to die before that time,
gave all this money to me on my twenty-first birthday. The interest on
this money, amounting to five thousand pounds annually, was to go to
you regularly, in one case, or to me, in the other. Oswald Banks was an
American, whom my mother had met in London several years prior to her
first marriage. He was the London representative of a big Pennsylvania
manufacturing concern. He was ambitious, unscrupulous and clever beyond
conception. He still is all of these and more, for he is now a coward.

"Well, it was he who concocted the diabolical scheme to one day get
possession of your inheritance. He coerced my poor mother into
acquiescense, and she became his wretched tool instead of an honoured
wife and helpmate. One night, when you were three weeks old, the house
in which we lived was burned to the ground, the inmates narrowly
escaping. So narrow was the escape, in fact, that you were said to have
been left behind in the confusion, and the world was told, the next day,
that the granddaughter of Lord Brace had been destroyed by the flames.

"The truth, however, was not told. My stepfather did not dare to go so
far as to kill you. It was he who caused the fire, but he had you
removed to a small hotel in another part of the city some hours earlier,
secretly, of course, but in charge of a trusted maid. My mother was
responsible for this. She would not listen to his awful plan to leave
you in the house. But you might just as well have died. No one was the
wiser and you were given up as lost. A week later, my mother and Mr.
Banks started for America. You and I were with them, but you went as the
daughter of a maid-servant--Ellen Hayes.

"This is the story as my mother has told it to me after all these years.
My stepfather's plan, of course, was to place you where you could never
be found, and then to see to it that our grandfather did not succeed in
changing his will. Moreover, he was bound and determined that he himself
should be named as trustee--when the fortune came over at Lord Brace's
death. That part of it turned out precisely as he had calculated. Let me
go on a few months in advance of my story. Lord Brace died, and the will
was properly probated and the provisions carried out. Brace Hall and the
estates went to your father and the bequest came to me, for you were
considered dead. My stepfather was made trustee. He gave bond in England
and America,