“It isn’t that, sir,” gasped the soldier; “there’s money enough and to spare. It’s my cousin Susy; that poor little innocent creature, that was as pure as the apple-blossoms on the gnarled old trees in the orchard when I left home. She’s done something, sir--something that turned her father against her. She’s gone away, sir, and no one knows where she’s gone, or what’s come of her, or whether she’s dead or alive. And her father disinherited her, poor lost lamb; and--that’ll tell you all about the fortune, sir, if you want to know about it.” Francis Tredethlyn threw the lawyer’s letter upon the table before his master, and walked away to the window--the same window at which the ensign had stood looking out at the convicts half an hour before. Harcourt Lowther read the lawyer’s letter, at first with a listless, indifferent air, and then as eagerly as if he had been reading his own death-warrant. It was a long letter, worded in a very formal manner, but it set forth the fact that the fortune left by Oliver Tredethlyn to his nephew Francis amounted to something over thirty thousand a year. For some minutes after this fact had been made clear to him Harcourt Lowther sat with the open letter before him, staring at the lines. Then suddenly the blank stupor upon his face gave way to a look of despair. The ensign flung his head and arms upon the table, and burst into tears. “I have been eating my own heart in this place for nearly two years,” he sobbed, “and not one ray of light--no, by the heaven above me! not one--has dawned upon my life; and a valet, a private soldier, the fellow who scours my rooms and blacks my boots, has thirty thousand a year left him!” There was something so terrible in this hysterical outburst of rage and envy, something so utterly piteous in this unmanly revolt against another man’s good fortune, that Francis Tredethlyn forgot his own trouble before the aspect of his master’s degradation.