It was a terrible shock to Roland Ruthven to find that his father--his father of all men in the world!--whom through all the years of his life he had looked up to with love and reverence, and who seemed ever to him and to all who knew him, the model of chivalrous honour, should have acted thus, and he actually wept over the event! Again and again he read the confession that on one hand Philip had never loved him, had exasperated the general; and on the other, there was the chance--nay, the certainty--of a marriage being marred by the production of the will which was now dated nearly forty years back. "Justice must be done, at all risks and hazards--but justice to whom?" thought Roland. Ardgowrie seemed no longer his; as if touched by an enchanter's wand, it seemed already to have passed away, wood, wold, and mountain, by this cruel discovery. He felt homeless in a splendid home, his worldly prospects ruined, and Aurelia Darnel, the only girl he had ever loved, utterly lost to him! Why not destroy the will? But no--oh no! Roland felt his cheek crimson, as something seemed to whisper of this in his ear, and then he recalled his dead father's remorseful injunctions to himself. He looked up at the portrait of the lost and disinherited Philip--the outcast son of a patrician race, as limned by the President of the Scottish Academy. It represented a handsome young man, in a red hunting coat and cap, with regular but rather pale features, dark blue eyes and well defined eyebrows, with a pleasant smile that actually, to Roland's then distempered fancy, seemed to light up, as he looked on the portrait. Roland wiped the beady perspiration from his brow, and a moan as if of pain escaped him, but again and again he muttered-- "Justice shall be done--justice if it be not too late--oh Heaven--too late!" He stepped to the sideboard, filled a silver hunting cup with sherry, drained it at a draught, and taking up the two fatal documents, locked the Indian cabinet, and prepared to join Messrs. Hook and Crook, who were busy with certain accounts and papers in the library. Of lawyers, Roland, as a soldier, had ever a wholesome dread, and he shrank from the horror of disclosing this trickery on the part of his father even to them, whose lives were too probably but one long and tangled yarn of trickery and deceit; but again, he muttered that justice must be done. His assumed coolness deserted him, his face became livid, and his eyes sparkled with a strange light, when he spoke to them of the papers he had found, and laid them before their legal eyes. Then his proud pale face flushed scarlet, his dark eyebrows were knitted nearly into one, and his nether lip quivered with suppressed emotion and intense mortification, and in some degree the lawyers were also excited, but amazement was what they chiefly felt. "What did Mr. Ruthven intend to do?" "Justice," said he hoarsely. "But to whom?" "That is precisely what I have been asking of myself."