Richards sighed as he bent once more over his desk. He had been family lawyer to Mackenzie before he joined the firm of Griffin, Keane, and Co., and dearly loved the family, or what was left of it. He tried to work but couldn't now. Presently he closed the ledger with a bang and got down off his stool. "I say, Keane." he said, "I see a way out of this. Look here. You have nobody to leave your wealth to except dear little Gerty--" "Well?" "Well, Jack is precious fond of her; why not--" "He, he, he! ho, ho, ho!" laughed Keane. "Why, Richards, you're in your dotage, man! I've a _baronet_ in view for Gerty. And Jack is a _beggar_, although he does swing a sword at his side and fight the French." Richards went back to his stool quiet and subdued. "Poor Jack!" he muttered. * * * * * "Just two years this very day, Gerty dear, since poor Jack sailed away from England in the _Ocean Pride_." Flora Mackenzie bent listlessly over the harp she had been playing as she spoke, her fingers touching a chord or two that seemed in unison with her thoughts. The two girls, Gerty Keane and she, who were seldom separate now, by day or night, sat in Flora's boudoir, which had two great windows opening on to a balcony and overlooking the grand old gardens of Grantley Hall, Suffolk. Grant Mackenzie, a sturdy old one-armed soldier, was the proud owner of the Hall and all the wide, wooded landscape for miles around. Jack, now far away at sea, was his heir, and with his sister Flora, the only children the general had. The fine old soldier had been in possession of the property only about a dozen years, yet I fear he had inherited something else--namely, the lordly fashions of his Highland ancestry. That branch of the Clan Mackenzie to which he belonged was nothing unless proud. So long as it could hold its head a little higher than its neighbours it was happy, and when poverty came then death might follow as soon as it pleased. There was every appearance of unbounded wealth in and around Grantley Hall. The house was a massive old Elizabethan mansion, half buried in lofty lime and elm and oak trees, approached by a winding drive, and a long way back from the main road that leads through this beautiful shire from north to south.