Again and again they have brought me documents, and I have always said that I would consider them at five and twenty, when I came of age under my father's will.

I went on the sly to a lawyer in Kingswell and paid him a guinea for his advice, and he put me up to that.

'Sign nothing,' he said, and I have signed nothing, so, except by forgery nothing can have gone.

Still for all that it may have gone.
For anything I know I am not worth more than the clothes I stand in, although my father was a very rich man." "If so, we are about in the same boat, Barbara," Alan answered with a laugh, "for my present possessions are Yarleys, which brings in about L100 a year less than the interest on its mortgages and cost of upkeep, and the L1700 that Aylward paid me back on Friday for my shares.

If I had stuck to them I understand that in a week or two I should have been worth L100,000, and now you see, here I am, over thirty years of age without a profession, invalided out of the army and having failed in finance, a mere bit of driftwood without hope and without a trade." Barbara's brown eyes grew soft with sympathy, or was it tears?
"You are a curious creature, Alan," she said.