The letter referred to was written by Mr. Page, and was read and approved of by Sir Gilbert before being sealed up. It was nothing more than a briefly worded intimation to the effect that two thousand pounds, being the amount of the late Mrs. Fleming’s legacy to her godson, was awaiting his disposal in the hands of the executors at such and such an address. But the baronet had no knowledge of the little private note from the same pen which the lawyer contrived to smuggle into the envelope. In it he reproached Alec for having allowed so long a time to pass without communicating with him, begging him at once to repair the omission, and assuring him that in the writer he had a friend who might always be relied upon to keep a watchful eye over his interests. Mr. Winch started on his long journey in due course. He would attend, first of all, to that other business which was taking him across the Atlantic, and then make the best of his way to Pineapple City. Mr. Winch was an undersized, podgy man, with a round full-moon sort of face and cold fish-like eyes of no hue in particular, to which a pair of spectacles lent a still more vacuous expression. He was clean shaven, always dressed in well-worn black, and, wet or fine, was never seen without a serviceable alpaca umbrella. He had been Mr. Page’s confidential clerk for many years, and that gentleman esteemed him highly. Behind that Dutch-clock-like mask of a face was a complex-working brain which delighted in secrets and mysteries, and occasionally went so far as to imagine them where none existed. Although his employer had never told him so—for that was one of the few matters which the lawyer kept to himself—Mr. Winch had not the least doubt in his mind that the John Alexander to whom the letter of which he was the bearer was addressed and the heir of Withington Chase, who had set out on his travels upwards of four years ago and had never returned, were one and the same person. The name alone had been enough to furnish him with the first hint. He seemed to scent a most delightful mystery. Mr. Winch was jubilant, although, to look at him, nobody would have guessed it. What, then, must have been his feelings—indeed, it is not too much to say that a tear blurred his spectacles—as on the morning of the twenty-first day after his departure from Liverpool he stood in the telegraph office at Pineapple City and wrote out the following cablegram, addressed to Mr. Page: “J. A. killed. Steamboat explosion—September 18th. Am returning at once.” The mystery on which he had counted had all at once collapsed owing to the death of the person chiefly concerned. It became Mr. Page’s unenviable duty, on receipt of the above message, to convey the news to Sir Gilbert. Over what passed between the two on that occasion we need not linger.