Poor Dick's heart sank within him. He knew it himself already; but still, he had cherished throughout some vague shadow of a hope that the lawyer might discover some faint flaw in the evidence which, as he considered, had disinherited him. There was nothing for it now but to pocket at once the Plantagenet pride and the Plantagenet thousands--to descend from his lofty pedestal and be even as the rest of us are--except for the fortune. He turned to Gillespie with a sigh. 'I was afraid of this,' he said. 'I expected that answer. Well, well, it'll make my dear mother happy; and it'll at least enable me to go back again to Oxford.' That last consideration was indeed in Maud's eyes the one saving grace of an otherwise hopeless and intolerable situation. Gradually, bit by bit, though it was a very hard struggle, they reconciled themselves to their altered position. The case was prepared, and, as their lawyer had anticipated, went straight through the courts with little or no difficulty, thanks to Dick's admirable working up of all the details of the pedigree. By the time eight months were out, Dick had come into the inheritance of 'the Plantagenets who left the money,' and was even beginning to feel more reconciled in his heart to the course of events which had robbed him so ruthlessly of his fancied dignity, but considerably added to his solid comfort. Before Dick returned to Oxford, however, to finish his sadly interrupted University career, he had arranged with Mary that as soon as he took his degree they two should marry. As for poor Maud, woman that she was, the loss of that royal ancestry that had never been hers seemed to weigh upon her even more than it weighed upon her brother. The one point that consoled her under this crushing blow was the fact that Archie, for whose sake she had minded it most at first, appeared to care very little indeed whether the earliest traceable ancestor of the girl he loved had been a royal Plantagenet or a shoemaking Muggins. It was herself he wanted, he said with provoking persistence, not her great-great-great grandfathers. Maud could hardly understand such a feeling herself; for when Archie first took a fancy to her, she was sure it must have been her name and her distinguished pedigree that led an Oxford man and a gentleman, with means and position, to see her real good points through the poor dress and pale face of the country dancing-master's daughter.