oungest brother, but more especially for Luke on whom
he bestowed an amount of love and tender care which would have shamed
many a father by its unselfish intensity. That affection was a
beautiful trait in an otherwise not very lovable character.

"I daresay," resumed Luke after a little while, "that I have been
badly brought up. I mean in this way, that if--if the whole story is
true--if Uncle Arthur did marry and did have a son, then I should have
to go and shift for myself and for Jim and Frank and Edith. Of course
Uncle Rad would do what he could for us, but I should no longer be his
heir--and we couldn't go on living at Grosvenor Square and----"

"Aren't you rambling on a little too fast, dear?" said Louisa gently,
whilst she beamed with an almost motherly smile--the smile that a
woman wears when she means to pacify and to comfort--on the troubled
face of the young man.

"Of course I am," he replied more calmly, "but I can't help it. For
some days now I've had a sort of feeling that something was going to
happen--that--well, that things weren't going to go right. And this
morning when I got up, I made up my mind that I would tell you."

"When did you hear first, and from whom?"

"The first thing we heard was last autumn. There came a letter from
abroad for Uncle Rad. It hadn't the private mark on it, so Mr. Warren
opened it along with the rest of the correspondence. He showed it to
me. The letter was signed Philip de Mountford, and began, 'My dear
uncle.' I couldn't make head or tail of it; I thought it all twaddle.
You've no idea what sort of letters Uncle Rad gets sometimes from
every kind of lunatic or scoundrel you can think of, who wants to get
something out of him. Well, this letter at first looked to me the same
sort of thing. I had never heard of any one who had the right to say
'dear uncle' to Uncle Rad--but it had a lot in it about blood being
thicker than water and all the rest of it, with a kind of request for
justice and talk about the cruelty of Fate. The writer, however,
asserted positively that he was the only legitimate son of Mr. Arthur
de Mountford, who--this he professed to have only heard recently--was
own brother to the earl of Radclyffe. The story which he went on to
relate at full length was queer enough in all conscience. I remember
every word of it, for it seemed to get right away into my brain, then
and there, as if something was being hammered or screwed straight
into one of the cel