It is said that he hated you because you were the cause of her death.

On the day after your birth, old Lord Brace changed his will and bequeathed a vast amount of unentailed property to you, to be held in trust by your father until you were twenty-one years of age.

I was almost two years old at the time, and the old man, unexpectedly compassionate, inserted a provision which, in the event that you were to die before that time, gave all this money to me on my twenty-first birthday.

The interest on this money, amounting to five thousand pounds annually, was to go to you regularly, in one case, or to me, in the other.

Oswald Banks was an American, whom my mother had met in London several years prior to her first marriage.