To see that woman in the house of his fathers, was a terrible shock to him. Could it be that David had married her? He stole from his covert, and crawled across the moor to the gypsy's hut. There he was consoled by learning that the mistress of the house was a young girl, whom he rightly concluded to be the daughter of his brother David. In making a second visit with the same intent, he had another attack of the heart, and now knew that he would have died in the snow had not John found him. CHAPTER XXXVI. THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. We returned to England the next day. All the journey through, my uncles were continually reverting to the matter of John's parentage: the more they saw of him, the less could they believe lady Cairnedge his mother. Through questions put to him, and inquiries afterward made, they discovered that, when he went to London, he had gone to lady Cairnedge's lawyer, not his father's, of whom he had never heard--which accounted for his having on that occasion learned nothing of consequence to him. When we reached London, my uncle Edmund, who, having been bred a lawyer, knew how to act, went at once to examine the will left by John's father. That done, he set out for the place where John was born. The rest of us went home. The second day after our arrival there, uncle Edmund came. He had found perfect proof, not only that lady Cairnedge was John's step-mother, but that she had no authority over him or his property whatever. A long discussion took place in my uncles' study--I have to shift the apostrophe of possession--as to whether John ought to compel restitution of what she might have wrongfully spent or otherwise appropriated. She had been left an income by each of her husbands, upon either of which incomes she might have lived at ease; but they had a strong suspicion, soon entirely justified, that while spending John's money, she had been saving up far more than her own. But in the discussion, John held to it that, as she had once been the wife of his father, he would spare her so far--provided she had nowise impoverished either of the estates. He would insist only upon her immediate departure. “Yes, little one,” said my uncle, one summer evening, as he and I talked together, seated alone in the wilderness, “what we call misfortune is always the only good fortune. Few will say _yes_ in response, but Truth is independent of supporters, being justified by her children. “Until _misfortune_ found us,” he went on, “my brother and I had indeed loved one another, but with a love so poor that a wicked woman was able to send it to sleep. To what she might have brought us, had she had full scope, God only knows: _now_ all the women in hell could not separate us!” “And all the women in paradise would but bring you closer!” I ventured to add.