"But I am forgetting to tell you the great news. Your daughter-in-law to be, who do you think she is? A niece of the Stanleys, you will say. Never more mistaken in your life. She is no kin to them at all--not a drop of blood. She is your Aunt Selby's long-lost daughter. Think of that! The Indian, Paul, believed his squaw had killed her, but it seems she carried her into the country and left her at Bruneau's door, and Bruneau's wife, thinking she had enough of his children already on her hands, carried it up, and left it on the Stanleys' doorstep. Everybody supposed Muriel was their niece, though latterly the Bunces have been rather free with their innuendos. And now the girl turns out to be a great heiress. Strangest of all, it is what we have been calling Gerald's fortune, which she is heir to, and Gerald, the lucky boy, will get back by marriage the very fortune he loses by law. Nobody can say either that he marries Muriel for her money; but to tell the truth, they seem a pair of children in everything that relates to that." Ralph smoked his cigar through to the end, smoked it till the butt dropped of itself upon his letter, charring the paper before it went out. He continued to sit, rigid in every limb, with his features drawn, and grey, and set; breathing heavily, but never moving. His life seemed living itself over again before his eyes, the prizes he had striven for, the means by which he had tried to win them, the vicissitudes of his career, and the end which he had reached. "Fool," was the only word he uttered, and it escaped him in a tone of mingled misery and wonder; misery, that it was himself; wonder, that he should have done it; for now his consciousness seemed divided in two, one half judging and wondering and scorning, the other, crushed into little save memory, and a sense of being undone, and having become a burden longing to be shaken off. It was no awakening of conscience, such as moralists describe. He had never troubled himself with questions of right and wrong, true and false, honour and baseness. Success was the honour to which he had aspired, failure the one inexpiable baseness. A faculty unused in well-nigh half a century will scarcely leap into action and controlling predominance over powers and habits strengthened by constant use, all of a sudden. It was by his own poor standard that he stood condemned at last. He had so utterly and unnecessarily failed. What opportunities he had had! and how utterly they had been wasted in his hands.