Your brother's succession is now, I presume, your own, and it will be easy for you to make inquiry among his servants and retainers, so as to hear where the child is, if, fortunately, it shall be still alive." "I dare hardly hope it," said the Earl, with a deep sigh.

"Why should my brother have been silent to me ?" "Nay, my lord, why should he have communicated to your lordship the existence of a being whom you must have supposed the offspring of"-- "Most true--there is an obvious and a kind reason for his being silent.
If anything, indeed, could have added to the horror of the ghastly dream that has poisoned my whole existence, it must have been the knowledge that such a child of misery existed." "Then," continued the Antiquary, "although it would be rash to conclude, at the distance of more than twenty years, that your son must needs be still alive because he was not destroyed in infancy, I own I think you should instantly set on foot inquiries." "It shall be done," replied Lord Glenallan, catching eagerly at the hope held out to him, the first he had nourished for many years;--"I will write to a faithful steward of my father, who acted in the same capacity under my brother Neville--But, Mr.Oldbuck, I am not my brother's heir." "Indeed!--I am sorry for that, my lord--it is a noble estate, and the ruins of the old castle of Neville's-Burgh alone, which are the most superb relics of Anglo-Norman architecture in that part of the country, are a possession much to be coveted.

I thought your father had no other son or near relative." "He had not, Mr.Oldbuck," replied Lord Glenallan; "but my brother adopted views in politics, and a form of religion, alien from those which had been always held by our house.

Our tempers had long differed, nor did my unhappy mother always think him sufficiently observant to her.

In short, there was a family quarrel, and my brother, whose property was at his own free disposal, availed himself of the power vested in him to choose a stranger for his heir.