"MY DEAR BARNCASTLE,--I understood your game from the beginning. It was audacious, but unavailing, as the attack of a finite upon an infinite mind must always be. I led you on to your own undoing if you so regard it. I removed gladly every obstacle from your path, and let you think in your own conceit that you were an easy victor in the fight. By so doing I put your caution asleep, and when your caution slept you became a victim to my ambition just as did Chatford, with this exception, that I have left you in a position to enjoy life, while circumstances made it necessary for me to place him in perpetual exile. Perhaps when you get this letter and realize what I have done, you will curse me. Do not do so. You are not a loser in the premises. You have gained the Burningford estates, you have gained the enjoyment of the honours which I have won, at the expense of the difference of strength between the body I have put off and this one of yours which I now occupy. The latter, let me say to you, is a superb specimen, the ideal habitation for a soul like mine. Aided by it a still greater future than the one, to be paradoxical, I have left behind me, will be mine, and not mine only, but yours also, since it is under your name that my future greatness is to be achieved. I repeat, do not curse me, for in cursing me you but curse yourself, and when you get over the first sensation of horror at the changes I have wrought in our respective destinies, and can think upon it calmly and dispassionately, you will not find me so much to blame. Nor are you to be deprived of any of your years by my act. The infusion of a younger spirit into the corse of Barncastle will make it young again, and gradually you will recover the physical ground you now seem to have lost. "I sail for New York on the _City of Paris_ to-morrow, and you may rest assured that the name that now flies at the mast-head in the firm of Toppleton, Morley, Bronson, Mawson, Perkins, Harkins, Smithers and Hicks will no longer be a mere figurehead, a minimum among maxima; it will become once more what it used to be, a tower of strength in the legal profession, and, permit me to say, a tower of such height that beside it the famous structure erected by your illustrious father will become but as an ant hill to the pyramid of Cheops.