th a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and begins
to read it. At the end of the second page, he starts, re-reads a
sentence or two, and suddenly his face becomes illuminated. He throws up
his head. He cackles a bit. He looks as if he wants to say something
very badly--"Hurrah," probably--only he has forgotten how to do it, and
finally goes back to the letter again, and this time--the third
time--finishes it.

Yes. It is all right! Why on earth hadn't he read it _first_? So, the
girl is to be sent to live with her aunt after all--an old lady--maiden
lady. Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury. Miss Jane Majendie.
Mother's sister evidently. Wynter's sisters would never have been old
maids if they had resembled him, which probably they did--if he had any.
What a handsome fellow he was! and such a good-natured fellow too.

The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his
spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his.
After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter of
anything but good nature. Well! He had wronged him there. He glances at
the letter again.

He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems. Guardian of her
fortune, rather than of her.

The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the--er--pleasure of her
society--_he_, of the estate only.

Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich--actually _rich_. The professor
pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre
apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the
scientific world--and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far--has enabled
him to improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt, and distinctly
outside the line of _want_, a thing to be grateful for, as his family
having in a measure abandoned him, he, on his part, had abandoned his
family in a _measure_ also (and with reservations), and it would have
been impossible to him, of all men, to confess himself beaten, and
return to them for assistance of any kind. He could never have enacted
the part of the prodigal son. He knew this in earlier days, when husks
were for the most part all he had to sustain him. But the mind requires
not even the material husk, it lives on better food than that, and in
his case mind had triumphed over body, and borne it triumphantly to a
safe, if not as yet to a victorious, goal.

Yet Wynter, the spendthrift, the erstwhile master of him who now could
be _his_ master, has die