They had all loved him, if they had not revered him, and, indeed, he had been generally regarded as a sort of living and lasting joke amongst them.
Curzon, holding the letter in his hand, and bringing back to his memory the handsome face and devil-may-care expression of his tutor, remembers how the joke had widened, and reached its height when, at forty years of age, old Wynter had flung up his classes, leaving them all _plant l濱 as it were, and declared his intention of starting life anew and making a pile for himself in some new world.
Well! it had not been such a joke after all, if they had only known.

Wynter _had_ made that mythical "pile," and had left his daughter an heiress! Not only an heiress, but a gift to Miss Jane Majendie, of somewhere in Bloomsbury.
The professor's disturbed face grows calm again.

It even occurs to him that he has not eaten his breakfast.

He so _often_ remembers this, that it does not trouble him.

To pore over his books (that are overflowing every table and chair in the uncomfortable room) until his eggs are India-rubber, and his rashers gutta-percha, is not a fresh experience.