ompous severity of a
guardian and trustee.

Seated at a long desk littered with a multitude of papers, Professor
Andrew Fraser coldly bowed the two women to convenient seats. The
parvenu banker who had fled away after a bankruptcy due to the erection
and embellishment of "The Folly," had approved a semi-medieval plan of
construction which suggested a Norman stronghold or a Corsican mansion
arranged for a stubborn defense. Books, globes, maps, and papers
littered the floors, and were piled nearby in convenient heaps with
tell-tale flying signals of copious note taking. It was a bristling
Redoubt of Learning.

But on this sunny morning the retired Professor of Edinburg University
held sundry letters, dispatches, and legal papers clutched in his
claw-like hands. His eye rested upon Justine Delande, in a semi-hostile
glare, as he slowly said:

"I've sent for ye, as in the place of your father's daughter, ye must
know of the changes that come to us, with the chances of Life and the
sair ways o' the world." He was nervously fumbling with a selection of
the papers and he paused and coughed ominously. "There has come to us
news which has posted my son Douglas hastily back to India, to do your
father's last bidding."

Nadine Johnstone's trembling hand clutched Justine Delande's still
rounded arm.

"Her father the double of this grim ogre?" There was horror in her
conjecture, but no pang of affection at the easily divined disclosure.
"The news came to us suddenly, yesterday, and Douglas and I are left now
to screen ye from the robbers and cormorants of the world! Ye're one of
the richest women in Britain now--Hugh Fraser's daughter--for yere guid
father is no more! A sudden death--a sudden death! and his will leaves
you to me as a legal charge, for yere body and yere estate, till ye come
o' the legal age. T'hafs the next three years!"

With a single glance of stern deprecation, Andrew Fraser saw the girl
totter and her head fall upon the bosom of the woman who had "sorrowed
of her sorrows" in all the years of the lonely colorless infancy,
childhood, and budding womanhood! The old bookworm clung to the papers
as if that "documentary evidence" was an absolute guaranty, and he
held it ready to proffer in support of his theorem. His toughened
heart-strings were silent at natural affection's touch, and only twanged
to the never-dying greed for gold--useless gold!

In an unmoved wonder, the senile scholar listened to the broke