m immediately
on his return. He did what neither of us could do--he solved the mystery
of the Trust being hidden in the charcoal ashes. Admiral Bartram, you
must know, was all his life subject to fits of somnambulism. He had been
found walking in his sleep not long before his death--just at the time,
too, when he was sadly troubled in his mind on the subject of that very
letter in your hand. George's idea is that he must have fancied he was
doing in his sleep what he would have died rather than do in his waking
moments--destroying the Trust. The fire had been lighted in the pan not
long before, and he no doubt saw it still burning in his dream. This
was George's explanation of the strange position of the letter when
I discovered it. The question of what was to be done with the letter
itself came next, and was no easy question for a woman to understand.
But I determined to master it, and I did master it, because it related
to you."

"Let me try to master it, in my turn," said Magdalen. "I have a
particular reason for wishing to know as much about this letter as you
know yourself. What has it done for others, and what is it to do for
me?"

"My dear Magdalen, how strangely you look at it! how strangely you talk
of it! Worthless as it may appear, that morsel of paper gives you a
fortune."

"Is my only claim to the fortune the claim which this letter gives me?"

"Yes; the letter is your only claim. Shall I try if I can explain it in
two words? Taken by itself, the letter might, in the lawyer's opinion,
have been made a matter for dispute, though I am sure George would
have sanctioned no proceeding of that sort. Taken, however, with the
postscript which Admiral Bartram attached to it (you will see the lines
if you look under the signature on the third page), it becomes legally
binding, as well as morally binding, on the admiral's representatives.
I have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my
own language instead of in the lawyer's. The end of the thing was simply
this. All the money went back to Mr. Noel Vanstone's estate (another
legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one plain
reason--that it had not been employed as Mr. Noel Vanstone directed.
If Mrs. Girdlestone had lived, or if George had married me a few months
earlier, results would have been just the other way. As it is, half the
money has been already divided between Mr. Noel Vanstone's next of kin;
which means, translate