‘She was; and she has gone on being an invalid ever since; no more healthy mode of life. She lives on mutton cutlets and sago puddings, dry toast and weak tea, and if she indulges in a second glass of dry sherry thinks it a debauch. She believes in the homœopathists, and experimentalises upon her system with minute doses, which, if they do her no good, can hardly do her much harm. She spends her winters at Nice or Dawlish, knows not the meaning of emotion, and at the rate she lives—expenditure of vital force reduced to the lowest figure—she may go on living twenty-two years longer.’ ‘If you have no relations with Mr. Spalding Glenlyne, there is no reason why you should not undertake to protect the interests of your late client’s daughter,’ said Lucius. ‘I am quite ready to believe that your knowledge of the family may render your services better worth having than anybody else’s. I came to you in perfect good faith, and in ignorance of everything except the fact of Mr. Glenlyne’s marriage, and the melancholy fate of his wife, who died away from her husband and her child, as I have already told you.’ ‘A sad case for the lady,’ said the lawyer. ‘I should like to see those letters, by the way, of which you spoke a little while ago.’ ‘I have brought them with me,’ answered Lucius, producing the precious packet and the miniature. ‘What, a picture?’ cried Mr. Pullman. ‘Yes; that is my client’s portrait, undoubtedly, and a good likeness. A very handsome young man, Henry Glenlyne, but a weak one. Humph! These are the letters, are they?’ The lawyer read them carefully, and from time to time shook his head over them, with a slow and meditative shake, as who should say, ‘These are poor stuff.’ ‘There is very little to help your case here,’ he said, when he had finished this deliberate perusal. ‘The child is spoken of as _your little girl_, or _the little girl_, throughout. The most rational conclusion would be that the child was Sivewright’s child.’ ‘Yet in that case why should Mr. Glenlyne, a young man about town, be interested in the child? Why should he give money? Why should he supplicate for secrecy?’ ‘Matter for philosophical speculation, but hardly a question to submit to a jury, or put in an affidavit,’ replied Mr. Pullman coolly. ‘If there is nothing in those letters to help me, I will find the evidence I want elsewhere,’ said Lucius, inwardly fuming at this graybeard’s impenetrability. ‘I will go down myself to Sidmouth—hunt out the landlord of that cottage.’ ‘Of whose very name you are ignorant,’ interposed the man of business. ‘Find the servant; advertise for the nurse; discover the doctor who attended Mrs. Glenlyne when that child was born; and link by link forge the chain of evidence which shall reinstate Lucille Glenlyne in the name her cowardly father stole from her.’