"My dear Wilton," wrote Mrs. Bullivant to her half-brother a couple of days subsequently to the events recorded in the last chapter, "I have some very singular news for you which I lose no time in communicating; but whether--bearing in mind the peculiar features of the case--you will be inclined to stigmatize it as bad news or to bless it as good, seems to me somewhat problematical, and I at once confess that I am myself at a loss to know in which light to regard it. "Although my disappointment in the matter of Mr. Cortelyon's will was so extreme as almost for a time to drive me beyond myself, and to stir up within me feelings and passions to which I had been a stranger aforetime, and although I took a silent oath that, come what might, I would be revenged for what I then regarded, and still regard, as the vile trick of which I was made the victim; yet am I inclined to think that had it not been for your persistent fanning of the flame which just then burnt so fiercely within me, my passion would gradually have cooled down, my reason would have again found its equipoise, and I should never have given my sanction to a certain step, the rashness and futility of which I recognized almost from the moment of agreeing to it. "Mind, in writing this I am not imputing any blame to you; or, if there is any, we share it on equal terms. Your own disappointment was bitter enough in all conscience to goad you on to do things from which, at another time and in your calmer moments, you would have turned away as being not merely useless, but impolitic. "From the moment you placed young Cortelyon in my hands my almost insane longing to be revenged for the foul wrong his grandfather had done me slackened and grew faint, and I recognized with overwhelming clearness what a blunder we had made and with what a burden I had saddled myself. Now that I had got the child into my keeping what was I to do with him? There was the rub. As for carrying out the dark hint you one day let drop--only by way of trying me, I feel sure, and with no thought that I would agree to act on it--as you know, I shrank from it aghast. I have a child of my own, and I could not forget it; and, little cause as I had to love young C., whatever else might happen to him his life was absolutely safe so long as he remained under my roof. But the perplexing question of how to dispose of him was one which allowed me no rest. "As you are aware, from the date of the lad's arrival at Homecroft I put him into the sole charge of Mrs. Balchin (whom, as I have good reason for knowing, I can thoroughly trust), and kept him wholly secluded from the rest of the household, for whose benefit I invented a little fable explanatory of my reasons for acting as I did, but to what extent they believed it I have no means of knowing.