It was the story of Kingscote Yelverton's unfortunate life, put on record in the form of an affidavit for the benefit of his children, apparently with the intention that they should claim their inheritance when he was gone. The witnesses were an old midwife, long since dead, and a young Scripture reader, now a middle-aged and prosperous ecclesiastic in a distant colony; both of whom the lawyer remembered as features of the "old days" when he himself was a new-comer to the out-of-the-world place that counted Mr. King as its oldest inhabitant. It was a touching little document, in the sad story that it told and the severe formality of the style of telling it. Kingscote Yelverton, it was stated, was the second of three brothers, sons of a long line of Yelvertons of Yelverton, of which three, however, according to hereditary custom, only one was privileged to inherit the ancestral wealth. This one, Patrick, a bachelor, had already come into his kingdom; the youngest, a briefless barrister in comfortable circumstances, had married a farmer's daughter in very early youth (while reading for university honours during a long vacation spent in the farmer's house), and was the father of a sturdy schoolboy while himself not long emancipated from the rule of pastors and masters; and Kingscote was a flourishing young captain in the Guards--when the tragedy which shattered the family to pieces, and threw its vast property into Chancery, took place. Bradenham Abbey was neighbour to Yelverton, and Cuthbert Leigh of Bradenham was kin to the Yelvertons of Yelverton. Cuthbert Leigh had a beautiful daughter by his first wife, Eleanor D'Arcy; when this daughter was sixteen her mother died, and a stepmother soon after took Eleanor D'Arcy's place; and not long after the stepmother came to Bradenham Cuthbert Leigh himself died, leaving an infant son and heir; and not long after _that_ Mrs. Cuthbert Leigh married again, and her new husband administered Bradenham--in the interest of the heir eventually, but of himself and his own children in the meantime. So it happened that Elizabeth Leigh was rather elbowed out of her rights and privileges as her father's daughter; which being the case, her distant cousin and near friend, Mrs. Patrick Yelverton, mother of the ill-fated brothers (who lived, poor soul, to see her house left desolate), fetched the girl away from the home which was hers no more, and took her to live under her own wing at Yelverton. Then the troubles began. Elizabeth was young and fair; indeed, all accounts of her agreed in presenting the portrait of a woman who must have been irresistible to the normal and unappropriated man brought into close contact with her. At Yelverton she was the daily companion of the unwedded master of the house, and he succumbed accordingly. As an impartial chronicler, I may hazard the suggestion that she enjoyed a flirtation within lady-like limits, and was not without some responsibility in the matter.