Old Mr. Mottisfont had been dead for about a fortnight when the letter arrived. David Blake found it upon his breakfast table when he came downstairs. It was a Friday morning, and there was an east wind blowing. David came into the dining-room wishing that there were no such thing as breakfast, and there, propped up in front of his plate, was the letter. He stared at it, and stared again. A series of sleepless or hag-ridden nights are not the best preparation for a letter written in a dead man’s hand and sealed with a dead man’s seal. If David’s hand was steady when he picked up the letter it was because his will kept it steady, and for no other reason. As he held it in his hand, Mrs. Havergill came bustling in with toast and coffee. David passed her, went into his consulting room and shut the door. “First he went red and then he went white,” she told Sarah, “and he pushed past me as if I were a stock, or a post, or something of that sort. I ’ope he ’asn’t caught one of them nasty fevers, down in some slum. ’Tisn’t natural for a man to turn colour that way. There was only one young man ever I knew as did it, William Jones his name was, and he was the sexton’s son down at Dunnington. And he’d do it. Red one minute and white the next, and then red again. And he went off in a galloping decline, and broke his poor mother’s heart. And there’s their two graves side by side in Dunnington Churchyard. Mr. Jones, he dug the graves hisself, and never rightly held his head up after.” David Blake sat down at his table and spread out old Mr. Mottisfont’s letter upon the desk in front of him. It was a long letter, written in a clear, pointed handwriting, which was characteristic and unmistakable.