been found walking in his sleep not long before his death—­just at the time, too, when he was sadly troubled in his mind on the subject of that very letter in your hand.  George’s idea is that he must have fancied he was doing in his sleep what he would have died rather than do in his waking moments—­destroying the Trust.  The fire had been lighted in the pan not long before, and he no doubt saw it still burning in his dream.  This was George’s explanation of the strange position of the letter when I discovered it.  The question of what was to be done with the letter itself came next, and was no easy question for a woman to understand.  But I determined to master it, and I did master it, because it related to you.”

“Let me try to master it, in my turn,” said Magdalen.  “I have a particular reason for wishing to know as much about this letter as you know yourself.  What has it done for others, and what is it to do for me?”

“My dear Magdalen, how strangely you look at it! how strangely you talk of it!  Worthless as it may appear, that morsel of paper gives you a fortune.”

“Is my only claim to the fortune the claim which this letter gives me?”

“Yes; the letter is your only claim.  Shall I try if I can explain it in two words?  Taken by itself, the letter might, in the lawyer’s opinion, have been made a matter for dispute, though I am sure George would have sanctioned no proceeding of that sort.  Taken, however, with the postscript which Admiral Bartram attached to it (you will see the lines if you look under the signature on the third page), it becomes legally binding, as well as morally binding, on the admiral’s representatives.  I have exhausted my small stock of legal words, and must go on in my own language instead of in the lawyer’s.  The end of the thing was simply this.  All the money went back to Mr. Noel Vanstone’s estate (another legal word! my vocabulary is richer than I thought), for one plain reason—­that it had not been employed as Mr. Noel Vanstone directed.  If Mrs. Girdlestone had lived, or if George had married me a few months earlier, results would have been just the other way.  As it is, half the money has been already divided between Mr. Noel Vanstone’s next of kin; which means, translated into plain English, my husband, and his poor bedridden sister—­who took the money formally, one day, to satisfy the lawyer, and who gave it back again generously, the next, to satisfy herself.  So much for one half of this legacy.  The other half, my dear, is all yours.  How strangely events happen, Magdalen!  It is only two years since you and I were left disinherited orphans—­and we are sharing our poor father’s fortune between us, after all!”

“Wait a little, Norah.  Our shares come to us in very different ways.”

“Do they?  Mine comes to me by my husband.  Yours comes to you—­” She stopped confusedly, and changed color.  “Forgive me, my own love!” she said, putting Magdalen’s hand to her lips.  “I have forgotten what I ought to have remembered.  I have thoughtlessly distressed you!”