of care.

He went up to his brother with a generous impulse, and held out his
hand.

"Maximilian, from our boyhood you never liked me, and of late you have
done me a great wrong; but I am willing to believe that you did it from
a mistaken motive, and by me, at least, it shall never be recalled. My
father, in his wish to make amends for the one harsh act of his life to
me, has made a will which I know you consider unjust. I cannot dispute
his last desire that I should inherit Fairlie, but I can do what I know
he would sanction--divide with you the wealth his energy collected. Take
the half of the property, as if he had left it to you, and over his
grave let us forget the past!"

* * * * *

On the last day of the year, so eventful to them both, Falkenstein and
Valerie drove through the park at Fairlie. The role of a country
gentleman would have been the last into which Waldemar, with his
independent opinions and fastidious intellect, would have sunk; but he
was fond of the place from early associations, and he came down to take
possession. The tenantry and servants welcomed him heartily, for they
had often used to wish that the wild high-spirited child, who rode his
Shetland over the country at a headlong pace, and if he sometimes
teased their lives out, always gave them a kind word and merry laugh,
had been the heir instead of the one to whom they applied the old
proverb "still and ill."

The tenantry had been dismissed, the dinner finished, even the briarwood
pipe smoked out, and in the wide Elizabethan window of the library
Falkenstein stood, looking on the clear bright night, and watching the
Old Year out.

"You sent the deed of gift to-day to Maximilian?" said Valerie, clasping
both her hands on his arm.

"Yes. He does not take it very graciously; but perhaps we can hardly
expect that from a man who has been disinherited. I question if I should
accept it at all."

"But you could never have wronged another as he wronged you," cried
Valerie. "Oh, Waldemar! I think I never realised fully, till the day you
took your generous revenge, how noble, how good, how above all others
you are."

He smiled, and put his hand on her lips.

"Good, noble, silly child! those words may do for some spotless Gahlahad
or Folko, not for me, who, a month ago, was in debt to some of the
greatest blackguards in town, who have yielded to every temptation,
given way to every weakness; not with the exc