denly 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 died, 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