d, leaving behind him a fortune. What was the
sum? He glances back to the sheet in his hand and verifies his thought.
Yes--eighty thousand pounds! A good fortune even in these luxurious
days. He has died worth L80,000, of which his daughter is sole heiress!

Before the professor's eyes rises a vision of old Wynter. They used to
call him "old," those boys who attended his classes, though he was as
light-hearted as the best of them, and as handsome as a dissipated
Apollo. They had all loved him, if they had not revered him, and,
indeed, he had been generally regarded as a sort of living and lasting
joke amongst them.

Curzon, holding the letter in his hand, and bringing back to his memory
the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor, remembers
how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at forty years of
age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving them all _plante la_
as it were, and declared his intention of starting life anew and making
a pile for himself in some new world.

Well! it had not been such a joke after all, if they had only known.
Wynter _had_ made that mythical "pile," and had left his daughter an
heiress!

Not only an heiress, but a gift to Miss Jane Majendie, of somewhere in
Bloomsbury.

The professor's disturbed face grows calm again. It even occurs to him
that he has not eaten his breakfast. He so _often_ remembers this, that
it does not trouble him. To pore over his books (that are overflowing
every table and chair in the uncomfortable room) until his eggs are
India-rubber, and his rashers gutta-percha, is not a fresh experience.
But though this morning both eggs and rasher have attained a high place
in the leather department, he enters on his sorry repast with a glad
heart.

Sweet are the rebounds from jeopardy to joy! And he has so _much_ of
joy! Not only has he been able to shake from his shoulders that awful
incubus--and ever-present ward--but he can be sure that the absent ward
is so well-off with regard to this word's goods, that he need never give
her so much as a passing thought--dragged, _torn_ as that thought would
be from his beloved studies.

The aunt, of course, will see about her fortune. _He_ has has only a
perfunctory duty--to see that the fortune is not squandered. But he is
safe there. Maiden ladies _never_ squander! And the girl, being only
seventeen, can't possibly squander it herself for some time.

Perhaps he ought to call on her, however