As he drove to his uncle's house, he was tumbling over facts and figures, in the endeavour to arrive at some conclusion as to how he stood in the balance-sheet that must now be worked out. What a thing that _post-obit_ had turned out! Those cursed Jews who had dealt with him must have known ever so much more about his poor father's health than he did. They are such fellows to worm out the secrets of a family--all through one's own servants, and doctors, and apothecaries. The spies! They stick at nothing--such liars! How they pretended to wish to be off! What torture they kept him in! How they talked of the old man's nervous fibre, and pretended to think he would live for twenty years to come! "And the deed was not six weeks signed when I found out he had those epileptic fits, and they knew it, the wretches!--and so I've been hit for that huge sum of money. And there is interest, two years' nearly, on that other charge, and that swindle that half ruined me on the Derby. And there are those bills that Levi has got, but that is only fifteen hundred, and I can manage that any time, and a few other trifles." And he thought what yeoman's service Longcluse might and _would_ have rendered him in this situation. How translucent the whole opaque complexity would have become in a hour or two, and at what easy interest he would have procured him funds to adjust these complications! But here, too, fortune had dealt maliciously. What a piece of cross-grained luck that Longcluse should have chosen to fall in love with Alice! And now they two had exchanged, not shots, but insults, harder to forgive. And that officious fool, Vandeleur, had laid him open to a more direct and humiliating affront than had before befallen him. Henceforward, between him and Longcluse no reconciliation was possible. Fiery and proud by nature was this Richard Arden, and resentful. In Yorkshire the family had been accounted a vindictive race. I don't know. I have only to do with those inheritors of the name who figure in this story. There remained an able accountant and influential man on 'Change, on whose services he might implicitly reckon--his uncle, David Arden. But he was separated from him by the undefinable chasm of years--the want of sympathy, the sense of authority. He would take not only the management of this financial adjustment, but the carriage of the future of this young, handsome, full-blooded fellow, who had certainly no wish to take unto himself a Mentor. Here have been projected on this page, as in the disk of an oxy-hydrogen microscope, some of the small and active thoughts that swarmed almost unsuspected in Richard Arden's mind. But it would be injustice to Sir Richard Arden (we may as well let him enjoy at once the title which stately Death has just presented him with--it seems to me a mocking obeisance) to pretend that higher and kinder feelings had no place in his heart.