They troubled him, kept him from sleep for some hours. ***** But before he could give the question fuller thought, new and undreamed of conditions arose that changed the whole aspect of his life. It was a couple of days afterwards. He sat in a solicitor’s office staring at a little whiskered gentleman, whose even voice seemed to come from some other world. He had called in response to a letter, bringing with him the few documents he possessed--his dead mother’s marriage certificate, his own birth certificate, and his old indentures of apprenticeship. He had thought it a question of some trifling legacy on the part of the dead uncle whom he had never known, who had disowned his mother because she had brought disgrace on the family by marrying Sam Goddard the builder. He had conjectured that the hard old heart that had stonily refused succour to widowed sister had melted before his death, and had sought to make some little posthumous reparation to his sister’s son. Save that Robert Haig was a well-to-do hosier in Birmingham, Goddard knew nothing at all about him. But when the little whiskered man announced that this unknown uncle had died, wifeless, childless, and intestate, that he, Goddard, was the next-of-kin, and inherited, not only the business as it stood, but a considerable sum of invested money, that brought in between four and five hundred a year, he stared, open-mouthed, in blank amazement, and it was some time before he could recover his bewildered faculties. “Is there no one who has a better right to all this money than I?” he asked, after a while. “Not a soul. Since the death of his wife and daughter the late Mr. Haig had neither kith nor kin besides yourself.” “How did you find my whereabouts?” It seemed to him as if he were living for the moment the irresponsible life of comic opera. “Simplest thing in the world,” replied the lawyer. “Your mother’s letters were found docketed amongst Mr. Haig’s papers. The last one, appealing to him for help on the occasion of your father’s death, contained the address of the firm of cabinetmakers to whom you were indentured. They gave us your present address.” Goddard rose from his chair, and made one or two turns about the room. “It’s difficult to realise it all at once,” he said, stopping before the solicitor. “But I think I have grasped it now. What would you advise me to do?” “You had better go as soon as possible to Birmingham and see our principals, Messrs. Taylor & Blythe. We are only acting for them, you know. They will be able to go into fuller details with you, particularly in the matter of the hosiery business.” “They’ll have to sell that,” said Goddard quickly. “It would be a white elephant to me.” “I should strongly dissuade you from parting with it,” said the lawyer. “It appears to be a going concern. You should keep it on. Work it up. You would soon get into the way of it.”