'Are you quite sure that you need tell me anything at all?' asked Jane, and she laid her hand in his. 'I am quite sure,' he said; and then a very surprising thing happened, for he put Jane's hand aside and stood up before her. 'I 'm not even going to take your hand,' he said, 'until I have told you all about it. You see, there was a letter addressed to me amongst those on her writing-table yesterday. I 've shown it to the lawyer, but neither he nor I can make anything of it. It is directed to me to be given to me at her death; but she must have died while she was writing it. It leaves off in the middle of a sentence.' 'I think,' said Jane slowly, 'that nothing matters in the whole world so long as we have each other.' 'Ah, my dear!' said Peter, and he sat down on the bench and took her hand again. 'I 'll show you the letter,' he said suddenly, and brought the sheet of notepaper out of his pocket. 'May I read it?' said Jane. 'Yes, if you will,' he replied. Afterwards they could tell every word of the unfinished letter by heart; but at the first reading the words seemed merely to puzzle Jane Erskine, and conveyed very little sense to her. 'When you get this letter I shall be dead,' wrote the woman who had meant to live for many years, 'and before I die I think there is something which I had better tell you. I am not haunted by remorse nor indulging in a deathbed repentance, and I shall merely ask you not to hate me more than you can help when you have finished reading this letter. You must often have heard of your elder brother who died when I was in Spain, the year after your father's death. He did not die----' 'There must be something more,' said Jane. She turned the page this way and that, as though to read some writing not decipherable by other eyes. 'I 've looked everywhere,' said Peter; 'there 's nothing more. Besides, you see, she stops in the middle of a sheet of notepaper. Why should she have written anything else on another piece?' They read the letter again together, scanning the words line by line. 'What can it mean?' she said at last. 'I have evidently got an elder brother,' said Peter briefly, 'to whom everything belongs. Most people remember that my mother took a curious antipathy to the other little chap when I was born. I can't make it out in any possible way--no one can, of course. But it seems pretty plain that no will can be proved, nor can I touch anything, until my brother is known to be either dead or alive.' 'What can we do?' said Jane. Their two hands were locked together, and the trouble was the trouble of both. 'I can go out to Spain, where he is supposed to have died,' said Peter, 'and make inquiries.' 'I want to ask you something,' said Jane, after a pause. 'Let us be married quietly, first of all, and then we can do everything together.'