e poor little heir!" exclaimed Valentine, rather
contemptuously. "I would not be in his shoes for a good deal! But
Giles--but Giles--you have shown me the letter!"

He started up.

"Yes, there it is," said Giles, glancing again at the _Times_, for he
perceived instantly that Valentine for the first time had remembered on
what contingency he was to be told of this matter.

There it was indeed! The crisis of his fate in a few sorrowful words had
come before him.

"At Corfu, on the 28th of February, to the inexpressible grief of his
mother, Peter, only child of the late Peter Melcombe, Esq., and
great-grandson and heir of the late Mrs. Melcombe, of Melcombe. In the
twelfth year of his age."

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Valentine, in an awestruck whisper. "Then it
has come to this, after all?"

He sat silent so long, that his brother had full time once more to
consider this subject in all its bearings, to perceive that Valentine
was trying to discover some reasonable cause for what his father had
done, and then to see his countenance gradually clear and his now
flashing eyes lose their troubled expression.

"I know you have respected my poor father's confidence," he said at
last.

"Yes, I have."

"And you never heard anything from him by word of mouth that seemed
afterwards to connect itself with this affair?"

"Yes, I did," Brandon answered, "he said to me just before my last
voyage, that he had written an important letter, told me where it was,
and desired me to observe that his faculties were quite unimpaired long
after the writing of it."

"I do not think they could have been," Valentine put in, and he
continued his questions. "You think that you have never, never heard him
say anything, at any time which at all puzzled or startled you, and
which you remembered after this?"

"No, I never did. He never surprised me, or excited any suspicion at any
time about anything, till I had broken the seal of that letter."

"And after all," Valentine said, turning the pages, "how little there is
in it, how little it tells me!"

"Hardly anything, but there is a great deal, there is everything in his
having been impelled to write it."

"Well, poor man" (Giles was rather struck by this epithet), "if secrecy
was his object, he has made that at least impossible. I must soon know
all, whatever it is. And more than that, if I act as he wishes, in fact,
as he commands, all the world will set itself to investigate the
reas