Now--so perverse is human nature--I was no sooner self-assured of my moral quittance from the bonds which had held me so long and so wistfully to an imaginary grievance, than my soul rose in mutiny against my own emancipation. Was she not actually, then, my mother after all--this cold, beautiful spirit, whose countenance I had so longed to gain, whose aversion, so little concealed, had been the cruel pain of my life? It would appear so, indeed; it would appear that I had been wasting my heart on the shadow of a love--the blasphemy of a worship which God Himself had suddenly exposed for a sham. I was stripped in a moment even of the cold comfort of that false religion. I had no longer the right of natural appeal from an inhuman sentence. And I had only myself to thank for my awakening. Wilfully, with my eyes open, I had gone about this business of my own damnation. There was such an intolerable sting in the thought, that, in its last full realisation, I jumped to my feet, restless to pace away the agitation it caused me. As I did so, the book which I had taken from the shelf dropped roughly from my knees to the floor, and a folded paper fell from it. I stooped mechanically to pick up the latter, as mechanically opened it out, and, two-thirds preoccupied, ran my eyes down the sheet. Instantly, with a little shock of amazement, they were caught and riveted to a name written thereon. A sigh, as of one just awakened, came from me, What was to follow? I thought I could tell already. There was a signature at the foot of the paper, and I believed I knew whose it would be--the signature of Charlie Skene, his lordship’s dead son; and so it proved. It gave me an odd thrill to look at it--the boyish scrawl in its faded ink; and attesting--what? You shall hear. Walking on tiptoe, as if in some instinctive emotion towards secrecy, I carried my “find” to the lamp and examined it. It was the half, the second half, of a sheet of foreign notepaper, and had been used evidently by some reader (probably the correspondent to whom it had been addressed) for a marker in the volume I had dropped. Heedless trifling with a thing so pregnant with destiny! Yet Luck, no doubt, had arranged it so. It ran as follows, starting on a broken sentence:--