“My dear,” said the elder lady--the words came back to him, and the scene, as plainly as on that day when he watched the old man sleeping in his chair--“my dear, we are a family of misfortune.” “But why--why--why?” asked the other. “What have we done?” “Things,” said the elder lady, “are done which are never suspected. Nobody knows; nobody finds out: the arm of the Lord is stretched out, and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children and----” Leonard drove the memory back--the lawn and the garden: the two women sitting in the veranda: the child playing on the grass: the words--all vanished. Leonard returned to the present. “Ghosts!” he said. “Ghosts! Were these superstitious fears ever anything but ghosts?” He refused to think of these things: he put aside the oracle of the wise woman, the admonition that he was too fortunate a youth. You have seen how he opened the first of a small heap of letters. His eye fell upon the others: he took up the first and opened it: the address was that of a fashionable West-End hotel: the writing was not familiar. Yet it began “My dear nephew.” “My dear nephew?” he asked; “who calls me his dear nephew?” He turned over the letter, and read the name at the end, “Your affectionate uncle, Fred Campaigne.” Fred Campaigne! Then his memory flew back to another day of childhood, and he saw his mother--that gentle creature--flushing with anger as she repeated that name. There were tears in her eyes--not tears of sorrow, but of wrath--and her cheek was aflame. And that was all he remembered. The name of Frederick Campaigne was never more mentioned. “I wonder,” said Leonard. Then he went on reading the letter: “MY DEAR NEPHEW, “I arrived here a day or two ago, after many years’ wandering. I lose no time, after the transaction of certain necessary business, in communicating with you. At this point, pray turn to my signature.” “I have done so already,” said Leonard. He put the letter down, and tried to remember more. He could not. There arose before his memory once more the figure of his mother angry for the first and only time that he could remember. “Why was she angry?” he asked himself. Then he remembered that his uncle Christopher, the distinguished lawyer, had never mentioned Frederick’s name. “Seems as if there was a family scandal, after all,” he thought. He turned to the letter again.