"My amazement and discomfiture when I found that my father's will was of so far distant a date that it made no mention of you were great. I could not understand why he had not supplemented the will which existed by another, in which you would be amply provided for, and his wishes concerning your future fully explained. My long and wilful absence from my father had prevented my having any real acquaintance with you. To me you were merely a name, seldom heard, hardly remembered. Had I not gone to Knockholt when I did, you would have remained so; and there was no one else who could be supposed to take an obligatory interest in you. How came it, I thought, that my father had taken no precaution against such a contingency--which, in fact, had so nearly been a reality? You will say he trusted to the honour and the gentlemanly feeling of his son; and so I read the riddle also; but reflection showed me that I was wrong. A more strictly just man never lived than my father; and he must have been strictly unjust had he allowed the future fortunes of a young girl whom he had reared and educated--who had been to him as a daughter for years--to depend upon the caprice or the generosity of a man to whom she was an utter stranger, and between whom and herself the tie of blood was of the slightest description. Nor was delicacy less characteristic of my father than justice. (Ah, Helen, how keenly I can see all these things now that he is gone!) He would have shrunk as sensitively as you would from anything that would have obliged you and me to meet for the first time in the characters of pensioned and pensioner. I knew all this; and I was utterly confounded at the absence of any later will. I had the most complete and diligent search made; but in vain. There was no will, Helen, but there was a letter. In the drawer of the desk which my father always used, there was a letter. How do you think it was addressed? Not to 'my son'--not to 'Colonel Alsager;' but to 'Sir Laurence Alsager, Bart.'! It was a painful letter--painful and precious; painful because a tone of sadness, of disappointment, of content in feeling that the writer had nearly reached his term of life, pervaded it; precious because it was full of pardon and peace, of the fulness of love for his only son. I cannot let you see the letter,--it is too sacred for any eyes but those for which it was intended; but I can tell you some of its contents, and I can make you understand its tone. As a mother speaks to her son going forth into the arena of life, the night before their parting, in the dark, on her knees, by his bedside, with her head upon his pillow; as she speaks of the time to come, when she will watch and wait for him, of the time that is past, whose memories are so precious, which she bids him remember and be brave and true; as she makes light of all his faults and shortcomings,--so did my dear old father--my father who had grown gray and old; alone, when I might have been with him, and was