et, how
reconcile this with his dying charges to Lionel, touching the management
of the estate?

The broad fact that there was the will, and that alone to act upon,
untempered by a codicil, shone out all too clearly. Lionel Verner was
displaced, and Frederick Massingbird was the heir.

Oh, if some impossible electric telegraph could but have carried the
news over the waves of the sea, to the ship ploughing along the mid-path
of the ocean; if the two fugitives in her could but have been spirited
back again, as the codicil seemed to have been spirited away, how
triumphantly would they have entered upon their sway at Verner's Pride.

CHAPTER XVIII.

PERPLEXITY.

It was a terrible blow; there was no doubt of that; very terrible to
Lionel Verner, so proud and sensitive. Do not take the word proud in its
wrong meaning. He did not set himself up for being better than others,
or think everybody else dirt beneath his feet; but he was proud of his
independence, of his unstained name--he was proud to own that fine
place, Verner's Pride. And now Verner's Pride was dashed from him, and
his independence seemed to have gone out with the blow, and a slight
seemed to have fallen upon him, if not upon his name.

He had surely counted upon Verner's Pride. He had believed himself as
indisputably its heir, as though he had been Stephen Verner's eldest
son, and the estate entailed. Never for a moment had a doubt that he
would succeed entered his own mind, or been imparted to it from any
quarter. In the week that intervened between Mr. Verner's death and
burial, he had acted as entire master. It was he who issued orders--from
himself now, not from any other--it was he who was appealed to. People,
of their own accord, began to call him Mr. Verner. Very peremptory
indeed had been a certain interview of his with Roy the bailiff. Not, as
formerly, had he said, "Roy, my uncle desires me to say so and so;" or,
"Roy, you must not act in that way, it would displease Mr. Verner;" but
he issued his own clear and unmistakable orders, as the sole master of
Verner's Pride. He and Roy all but came to loggerheads that day; and
they would have come quite to it, but that Roy remembered in time that
he, before whom he stood, was his head and master--his master to keep
him on, or to discharge him at pleasure, and who would brook no more
insubordination to his will. So Roy bowed, and ate humble pie, and hated
Lionel all the while. Lionel had seen