“I have proved my claim; it was not contested,” the young man began. “When I first discovered that my mother’s marriage was valid, and that I was the rightful heir to Wycliffe, I thought I would go at once and compel my grandfather to acknowledge me as such. But he had been so stern and cruel to my mother that I recoiled from him. I was under age, and I knew he would be apt to deal sternly with me also, and demand implicit obedience to him. I knew if I went to him he would in all probability refuse to allow me to follow the course I had marked out for myself. So I resolved I would never cross the threshold over which my mother had been so relentlessly driven until I had either discovered the man who had so wronged her, and could tell the marquis that I had found him and proved that he had legally bound himself to her, or until his death, when of course it would become necessary that I should reveal my identity. So I began my lonely wanderings upon a very uncertain mission. I discovered upon inquiry that a George Sumner had been studying at a certain German university. I immediately repaired thither, and found, upon examining the books, that he was an American from a certain town in the State of New York. And now allow me to ask why you registered only a part of your name instead of the whole?” Earle asked, pausing. “It does not matter,” Mr. Dalton muttered, uneasily, and with a rising flush. It might as well be mentioned here what Earle afterward discovered, that he became implicated in a very shameful affair while studying in a noted college of his own country, and was expelled in deep disgrace, whereupon he had immediately gone abroad to finish his course in the German university referred to. Fearing that there might be other American students there who knew of the disgraceful affair in which he had been a leader, he resolved not to give his whole name, and thus escaped being a marked man. He accordingly gave only his first two names, and though there were, as he feared, other students there who did know of the escapade connected with his previous college life, yet they never suspected that George Sumner and George Dalton, as he had before been known, were the same person. With a slight curl of his lip at the man’s reply, Earle continued: “As soon as I found he was an American, I resolved to come to America and prosecute my search. But I was a poor boy; I had refused the aid which my grandfather had hitherto given my mother—I could not use the money of a man who had so long disowned me, even though it might belong to me by right—and so I was obliged to do something for my support. That was how I came to be in Mr. Forrester’s employ; and every holiday, every spare day that he would grant me, I devoted to my search. I procured the directories of several cities, and studied up all the Sumners they contained, but could find none, upon seeking them out, who answered to the George Sumner that my dying mother had described to me.