p?
If I die to-morrow, John is my heir. Is he to let it alone? Could he?"

"I don't know," answered Brandon. "He has not the same temptation to
take it that you have."

"Temptation!" repeated Valentine.

Brandon did not retract or explain the word.

"And does he know any reason, I wonder, why he should renounce it?"
continued Valentine, but as he spoke his hand, which he had put out to
take the _Times_, paused on its way, and his eyes involuntarily opened a
little wider. Something, it seemed, had struck him, and he was recalling
it and puzzling it out. Two or three lilies thrown under a lilac tree by
John's father had come back to report themselves, nothing more recent or
more startling than that, for he was still thinking of the elder
brother. "And he must have hated him to the full as much as my poor
father did," was his thought. "That garden had been shut up for his sake
many, many years. Wait a minute, if that man got the estate wrongfully,
I'll have nothing to do with it after all. Nonsense! Why do I slander
the dead in my thoughts? as if I had not read that will many times--he
inherited after the old woman's sickly brother, who died at sea." After
this his thoughts wandered into all sorts of vague and intricate paths
that led to no certain goal; he was not even certain at last that there
was anything real to puzzle about. His father might have been under some
delusion after all.

At last his wandering eyes met Brandon's.

"Well!" he exclaimed, as if suddenly waking up.

"How composedly he takes it, and yet how amazed he is!" thought Brandon.
"Well," he replied, by way of answer.

"I shall ask you, Giles, as you have kept this matter absolutely secret
so long, to keep it secret still; at any rate for awhile, from every
person whatever."

"I think you have a right to expect that of me, I will."

"Poor little fellow! died at Corfu then. The news is all over Wigfield
by this time, no doubt. John knows it of course, now." Again he paused,
and this time it was his uncle's last conversation that recurred to his
memory. It was most unwelcome. Brandon could see that he looked more
than disturbed; he was also angry; and yet after awhile, both these
feelings melted away, he was like a man who had walked up to a cobweb,
that stretched itself before his face, but when he had put up his hand
and cleared it off, where was it?

He remembered how the vague talk of a dying old man had startled him.

The manner of the