"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 broken sobs of the child of Valerie Delavigne.

He was astounded at her financial carelessness, when she moaned: "Let me go away! Let me go!" and then she cried, "What care I for all this money--this useless wealth.

He is gone! I am now alone in the world! And--and, now I never will know the story of the past!" There was a stony gleam on the old Scotchman's face as the girl sobbed, "Mother! Mother! Lost to me forever, now." The cunning old Scotchman's face darkened at the mention of that long-forbidden name.