Francis Tredethlyn rubbed his broad palm across his forehead, as if to clear some kind of cloud away from his intellect. It was scarcely strange that he should be confused and mystified by the seasons. He had left autumnal clouds and winds in the Antipodes; and after a hundred days or so at sea, he found a blazing July sky above his native land, and he felt as if he had, somehow or other, been cheated out of a winter. He looked at a little pocket-book, in which he had written some names and addresses and other memoranda, and in which the initials “S. T.” occurred very often. Those initials meant Susan Tredethlyn, and the memoranda in the pocket-book chiefly related to inquiries which Francis had made about his lost cousin. Those inquiries had resulted in very little information. The lawyers had only been able to tell Francis the bare facts relating to his uncle’s death; how one day, when they least expected to see the old man, he had suddenly presented himself at their offices, very pale, very feeble, and with an awful something, which even they recognized as the sign-manual of the King of Terrors himself, imprinted on his haggard features: how he had seated himself quietly in his accustomed place, and had dictated to them, deliberately and unflinchingly, the terms of a will, by which he bequeathed every shilling he possessed to his nephew, Francis Tredethlyn; how, when they, as in duty bound, remonstrated with him about the injustice that such a will would inflict upon his only daughter, a hideous frown had distorted his face, and he had struck his clenched fist upon the office-table, crying, with the most horrible imprecation ever uttered in that place, that no penny of his getting should ever go to save his daughter from rotting in a workhouse or starving to death on the king’s highway;--he had said this, and in such a manner as most effectually to put an end to all remonstrance on the part of his solicitors. This was all that the lawyers could tell Francis Tredethlyn about his cousin Susan; but they had gone on to tell him how his uncle had insisted on leaving the office alone and on foot; how he had walked the best part of the way from Gray’s Inn to an old-fashioned commercial inn in the Borough, and how he had broken down at last, only a hundred yards from his destination, and had fainted away on the threshold of a chemist’s shop, whence he had been carried to his death-bed. This had happened on the 30th of June in the preceding year; and this was all that the lawyers had to tell Francis Tredethlyn, over and above such intelligence as related only to the extent and nature of the property bequeathed to him by his late uncle.