The letter moved me considerably. My father and I had never been very closely associated, but there was a genuine affection between us; and the courage with which he faced the inevitable, though so characteristically expressed, appealed to me strongly. I did not resent my virtual disinheritance. The lot of the younger son had never galled me much, and I was enough of a Carbonnell to admit the reasoning and to recognise that such money as there was must go to keep up the peerage. But I did not delude myself with any sparkling visions of what Lascelles would do for me if he married well; and I perceived quite plainly that now, indeed, my future lay in my own hands only, and that it would be only and solely such as I could make it. In one respect solely did this thought sting me. It was a barrier between Sarita and me. I must marry for money or not at all, for the plain bed rock reason that I had not, and probably never should have, money to support a wife. More than that, the letter doomed me to a continuance of my present career. I should be dependent upon it always for mere existence money; and this meant that I must make it the serious purpose of life, and not merely a means for extracting as much pleasure as possible out of the place where I might chance to be posted. This made me grave enough for a time, for I knew of a dozen men with more brains than I possessed, as qualified for the work as I was ignorant, and as painstaking as I was the reverse, who had toiled hard and religiously for many years to acquire just enough income to enable them to know how many of the good things of life they had to do without. But Nature had kindly left out the worry lobe from my brain, and I soon held lightly enough the news as it affected my own pecuniary prospects. I took more interest in my work that day than I should otherwise have taken, I think, and found it very irksome. I wrote to my father, and then went off to my rooms with a complete present irresponsibility and a feeling of thankfulness that I had always been a comparatively poor man, and that I should be a big fool if I were to add the wretchedness of worry to the sufficient burden of comparative poverty. I was whistling vigorously as I opened my door and stopped, with the handle in my fingers, in sheer surprise, at seeing in possession of my rooms the man whom I believed to be a spy. He was sitting reading as he waited, and on seeing me he rose and made me one of his ceremonious bows. "Who are you, and what do you want here?" I asked in none too gracious a tone, as I frowned at him. "Senor Ferdinand Carbonnell—you are Ferdinand Carbonnell?"—he repeated the name with a kind of relish—"I could not resist coming. I could not resist the desire to speak to you, to stand face to face with you, to take your hand. I have done wrong, I know; but I shall throw myself on your mercy. I am leaving again to-night; but I could not go without seeing you."