Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich—­actually rich.  The professor pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the scientific world—­and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far—­has enabled him to improve upon.  It has helped him to live, no doubt, and distinctly outside the line of want, a thing to be grateful for, as his family having in a measure abandoned him, he, on his part, had abandoned his family in a measure also (and with reservations), and it would have been impossible to him, of all men, to confess himself beaten, and return to them for assistance of any kind.  He could never have enacted the part of the prodigal son.  He knew this in earlier days, when husks were for the most part all he had to sustain him.  But the mind requires not even the material husk, it lives on better food than that, and in his case mind had triumphed over body, and borne it triumphantly to a safe, if not as yet to a victorious, goal.

Yet Wynter, the spendthrift, the erstwhile master of him who now could be his master, has died, leaving behind him a fortune.  What was the sum?  He glances back to the sheet in his hand and verifies his thought.  Yes—­eighty thousand pounds!  A good fortune even in these luxurious days.  He has died worth £80,000, of which his daughter is sole heiress!

Before the professor’s eyes rises a vision of old Wynter.  They used to call him “old,” those boys who attended his classes, though he was as light-hearted as the best of them, and as handsome as a dissipated Apollo.  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 planté là 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.  But though this morning both eggs and rasher have attained a high place in the leather department, he enters on his sorry repast with a glad heart.