"My Dear Aunt--If any one has persuaded you that I am eager to purchase your good-will at any sacrifice, and that in consideration of `supposed advantages' hereafter to be derived from you--I shall be willing to endure unkindly language or groundless insinuations about my other relatives--then they have very seriously misled you as to my real character. This is really the only reply of which your letter admits. I shall always be ready, as in duty bound, to bestow on you such respect and affection as our relationship demands and your own kindness may elicit, but I would scorn to win your favour at the expense of a subservience at once ungenerous and unjust. "Believe me to remain, your affectionate nephew, "Julian Home." This letter decided the matter. Lady Vinsear wrote back, that as he obviously cared nothing about her, and did not even treat her with ordinary deference, she had that day altered her will. Poor old lady! Julian's angry letter cost her many a pang; and that night, as she sat in her bedroom by her lonely hearth, and thought over her dead brother and this gallant high-souled boy of his, the tears coursed each other down her furrowed cheeks, and she could get no rest. At last she had taken her desk, and, with trembling hands, written:-- "Dearest Julian--Forgive an old woman's whim, and come to me and comfort my old age. All I have is yours, Julian; and I love you, though I wrote to you so bitterly.--Your loving aunt, "Caroline Vinsear." But when morning came, Sprong resumed her ascendency, and by raking up and blowing the cooled embers of her patroness' wrath, succeeded once more in fanning them to the old red heat, after which she poured vinegar upon them, and they exploded in the pungent fumes of the note which told our hero that he was not to hope, for the future, to be one day owner of a handsome fortune. Of course, at first he was a little downcast; and in talking to Lillyston, compared himself to Gautier sans avoir, and "Wilfred the disinherited." "Never mind, Julian; it matters very little to _you_," said Lillyston proudly. "Anyhow I must have no more fits of idleness," answered Julian. And indeed the only pain it caused him arose from the now necessary decision that he must go to Saint Werner's College _as a sizar_, or not at all. But for all that he went home with a light heart, and had once more gained the proud distinction of head-remove--one for which, at that time, I very much doubt whether he would have exchanged the prospect of a rich inheritance. And the misfortune proved an advantage to Cyril too, as we shall see.