now not, unless it was through the tutor with
the blue spectacles of whom I have spoken--and said that he was still
living on the farm of Jan Botmar in the Transkei. This was all that was
in the paper. I asked to look at it and kept it, saying in the morning
that the Kaffir girl seeing it lying about the kitchen had used it
to light the fire; but to this day it is with the other things in the
waggon chest under my bed.

When the paper was done with, the lawyer took up the tale and told me
that it was believed in England that Lord Glenthirsk had been drowned in
the sea, as indeed he was, and that Lady Glenthirsk and her son perished
on the shore with the other women and children, for so those sent by the
English Government to search out the facts had reported. Thus it came
about that after a while Lord Glenthirsk's younger brother was admitted
by law to his title and estates, which he enjoyed for some eight years,
that is, until his death. About a year before he died, however, someone
sent him the paragraph headed "Strange Tale of the Sea," and he was much
disturbed by it, though to himself he argued that it was nothing but an
idle story, such as it seems are often put into newspapers. The end of
the matter was that he took no steps to discover whether the tale were
true or false, and none knew of it save himself, and he was not minded
to go fishing in that ugly water. So it came about that he kept silent
as the grave, till at length, when the grave yawned at his feet, and
when the rank and the lands and the wealth were of no more use to him,
he opened his mouth to his son and to his lawyer, the two men who sat
before me, and to them only, bidding them seek out the beginning of the
tale, and if it were true, to make restitution to his nephew.

Now--for all this, listening with my ears wide open, and sometimes
filling in what was not told me in words, I gathered from the men before
they left the house--as it chanced the dying lord could not have chosen
two worse people for such an errand, seeing that although the son was
honest, both of them were interested in proving the tale to be false.
Since that time, however, often I have thought that he knew this
himself, and trusted by the choice both to cheat his own conscience
and to preserve the wealth and dignity for his son. God, to whom he has
gone, alone knows the truth of it, but with such a man it may very well
have been as I think. I say that both were interested, for it