llow."

"Take him away," said Ralph. "He's drunk." Then, without waiting for
further remonstrance from the good-natured but now indignant Cox, he
went off to his own room.

On the following morning he started for London by an early train, and
by noon was with his lawyer. Up to that moment he believed that he
had lost his inheritance. When he sent those two telegrams to his
brother and to his namesake, he hardly doubted but that the entire
property now belonged to his uncle's son. The idea had never occurred
to him that, even were the sale complete, he might still inherit the
property as his uncle's heir-at-law,--and that he would do so unless
his uncle had already bequeathed it to his son. But the attorney soon
put him right. The sale had not been yet made. He, Ralph, had not
signed a single legal document to that effect. He had done nothing
which would have enabled his late uncle to make a will leaving the
Newton estate to his son. "The letters which have been written are
all waste-paper," said the lawyer. "Even if they were to be taken
as binding as agreements for a covenant, they would operate against
your cousin,--not in his favour. In such case you would demand the
specified price and still inherit."

"That is out of the question," said the heir. "Quite out of the
question," said the attorney. "No doubt Mr. Newton left a will,
and under it his son will take whatever property the father had to
leave."

And so Ralph the heir found himself to be the owner of it all just
at the moment in which he thought that he had lost all chance of the
inheritance as the result of his own folly. When he walked out of the
lawyer's office he was almost wild with amazement. This was the prize
to which he had been taught to look forward through all his boyish
days, and all his early manhood;--but to look forward to it, as a
thing that must be very distant, so distant as almost to be lost in
the vagueness of the prospect. Probably his youth would have clean
passed from him, and he would have entered upon the downhill course
of what is called middle life before his inheritance would come to
him. He had been unable to wait, and had wasted everything,--nearly
everything; had, at any rate, ruined all his hopes before he was
seven-and-twenty; and yet, now, at seven-and-twenty, it was, as his
lawyer assured him, all his own. How nearly had he lost it all! How
nearly had he married the breeches-maker's daughter! How close upon
the rocks h