"Still, as it is best to be frank, I will tell you.

Yesterday I believed myself to be the inheritor of a very large fortune from an uncle whose fatal illness brought me back from South Africa before I meant to come, and as whose heir I have been brought up.

To-day I have learned for the first time that he married secretly, last year, a woman much below him in rank, and has left a child, who, of course, will take all his property, as he died intestate.

But that is not all.

Yesterday I believed myself to be engaged to be married; to-day I am undeceived upon that point also.