The young man took it, without looking at Sir Robert: and with his thoughts in a whirl—and underlying them a sick feeling of impending misfortune—he proceeded to read it, line after line, without taking in a single word. For all the time his brain was at work measuring the change. His modest competence would be left to him. He would have enough to live as he was now living, and to pursue his career; or, in the alternative, he might settle down as a small squire in his paternal home in South Wales. But the great inheritance which had loomed large in the background of his life and had been more to him than he had admitted, the future dignity which he had undervalued while he thought it his own, the position more enviable than many a peer’s, and higher by its traditions than any to which he could attain by his own exertions, though he reached the Woolsack—these were gone if Wetherell’s tale was true. Gone in a moment, at a word! And though he might have lost more, though many a man had lost his all by such a stroke and smiled, he was no hero, and he could not on the instant smile. He could not in a moment oust all bitterness. He knew that he was taking the news unworthily; that he was playing a poor part. But he could not force himself to play a better—on the instant. When he had read with unseeing eyes to the bottom of the first page and had turned it mechanically, he let the papers fall upon his knee. “You do not wish me,” he said slowly, “to express an opinion now, I suppose?” “No,” Wetherell answered. “Certainly not. But I have not quite done. I have not quite done,” he repeated ponderously. “I should tell you that for opening the matter to you now—we have two reasons, Mr. Vaughan. Two reasons. First, we think it due to you—as one of the family. And secondly, Vermuyden desires that from the beginning, his intentions shall be clear and—be understood.” “I thoroughly understand them,” Vaughan answered drily. No one was more conscious than he that he was behaving ill. “That is just what you do not!” Wetherell retorted stolidly. “You spill words, young man, and by and by you will wish to pick them up again. You cannot anticipate, at any rate, you have no right to anticipate, Sir Robert’s intentions, of which he has asked me to be the mouthpiece. The estate, of course, and the settled funds must go to his daughter. But there is, it appears, a large sum arising from the economical management of the property, which is at his disposal. He feels,” Wetherell continued sombrely, an elbow on each knee and his eyes on the floor, “that some injustice has been done to you, and he desires to compensate you for that injustice. He proposes, therefore, to secure to you the succession to two-thirds of this sum; which amounts—which amounts, in the whole I believe”—here he looked at White—“to little short of eighty thousand pounds.”