The transient color faded from her face, as she spread the little manuscript open on her lap.

The extracts from the will stood highest on the page; they were limited to those few touching words in which the dead father begged his children's forgiveness for the stain on their birth, and implored them to remember the untiring love and care by which he had striven to atone for it.
The extract from the letter to Mr.Pendril came next.

She read the last melancholy sentences aloud to herself: "For God's sake come on the day when you receive this--come and relieve me from the dreadful thought that my two darling girls are at this moment unprovided for.

If anything happened to me, and if my desire to do their mother justice ended (through my miserable ignorance of the law) in leaving Norah and Magdalen disinherited, I should not rest in my grave!" Under these lines again, and close at the bottom of the page, was written the terrible commentary on that letter which had fallen from Mr.Pendril's lips: "Mr.Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children, and the law leaves them helpless at their uncle's mercy." Helpless when those words were spoken--helpless still, after all that she had resolved, after all that she had sacrificed.

The assertion of her natural rights and her sister's, sanctioned by the direct expression of her father's last wishes; the recall of Frank from China; the justification of her desertion of Norah--all hung on her desperate purpose of recovering the lost inheritance, at any risk, from the man who had beggared and insulted his brother's children.