He poked it under the gate, and went away.
Here it is."

The letter was written on foolscap paper,
superscribed in a round legal hand. As Mr.
Treverton opened it, two slips cut from
newspapers dropped out. One fell on the table
before which he was sitting; the other
fluttered to the floor. This last slip
Shrowl picked up, and looked over its
contents, without troubling himself to go
through the ceremony of first asking
leave.

After slowly drawing in and slowly puffing
out again one mouthful of tobacco-smoke,
Mr. Treverton began to read the letter. As
his eye fell on the first lines, his lips began to
work round the mouth-piece of the pipe in a
manner that was very unusual with him. The
letter was not long enough to require him to
turn over the first leaf of it—it ended at the
bottom of the opening sheet. He read it
down to the signature—then looked up to
the address, and went through it again from
the beginning. His lips still continued to
work round the mouth-piece of the pipe, but
he smoked no more. When he had finished
the second reading, he set the letter down
very gently on the table, looked at his
servant with an unaccustomed vacancy in the
expression of his eyes, and took the pipe out
of his mouth with a hand that trembled a
little.

"Shrowl," he said, very quietly, " my
brother is drowned."

"I know he is," answered Shrowl, without
looking up from the newspaper-slip. " I'm
reading about it here."

"The last words he said to me when we
quarrelled about the player-woman,"
continued Mr. Treverton, speaking as much to
himself as to his servant, "were, that I should
die without one kind feeling in my heart
towards any living soul."

"So you will," muttered Shrowl, turning
the slip over to see if there was anything
worth reading at the back of it.

"I wonder what he thought about me when
he was dying? " said Mr. Treverton,
abstractedly taking up the letter again from
the table.

"He didn't waste a thought on you or anybody
else," remarked Shrowl. " If he thought
at all, he thought about how he could save
his life. When he had done thinking about
that, he had done living, too." With that
expression of opinion Mr. Shrowl went to
the beer-barrel, and drew his morning
draught.

"Damn that player-woman! " muttered
Mr. Treverton. As he said these words his
face darkened and his lips closed firmly. He
smoothed the letter out on the table. There
seemed to be some doubt in his mind whether
he had mastered all its contents yet—some
idea that there was more in it—or that there
ought to be more in it—than he had yet
discovered. In going over it for the third time,
he read it to himself aloud and very slowly,
as if he was determined to fix every separate
word firmly in his memory.

    " Sir (he read),—As the old legal adviser and
faithful friend of your family, I am desired by Mrs.
Frankland, formerly Miss Treverton, to acquaint you
with the sad news of your brother's death. This
deplorable event occurred on board the ship of which he
was captain, during a gale of wind in which the vessel was
lost on a reef of rocks off the island of Antigua. I
enclose a detailed account of the shipwreck extracted from
the Times, by which you will see that your brother
died nobly in the performance of his duty towards the
officers and men whom he commanded. I also send a
slip from the local Cornish paper, containing a memoir
of the deceased gentleman.

     "Before closing this communication, I must add that
no will has been found, after the most rigorous search,
among the papers of the late Captain Treverton.
Having disposed, as you know, of Porthgenna, the only
property of which he was possessed at the time of his
death was personal property, derived from the sale of
his estate; and this, in consequence of his dying
intestate, will go in due course of law to his daughter,
as his nearest of kin.

                            " I am, sir,
                                        " Your obedient servant,
                                                 " ALEXANDER NIXON."

The newspaper-slip, which had fallen on
the table, contained the paragraph from the
Times. The slip from the Cornish paper,
which had dropped to the floor, Shrowl
poked under his master's eyes, in a fit of
temporary civility, as soon as he had done
reading it. Mr. Treverton took not the
slightest notice either of the one
paragraph or the other. He still sat looking
at the letter, even after he had read it for
the third time.

"Why don't you give the strip of print a
turn, as well as the sheet of writing? " asked
Shrowl. " Why don't you read about what
a great man your brother was, and what a
good life he led, and what a wonderful handsome
daughter he's left behind him, and what
a capital marriage she's made along with the
man that's owner of your old family estate?
She don't want your money now, at any rate!
The ill wind that blowed her father's ship on
the rocks has blowed forty thousand pound of
good into her lap. Why don't you read about
it? She and her husband have got a better
house in Cornwall than you have got here.
Ain't you glad of that? They were going to
have repaired the place from top to bottom
for your brother to go and live along with
'em in clover when he come back from sea.
Who will ever repair a place for you? I
wonder whether your niece would knock the
old house about for your sake, now, if you
was to clean yourself up and go and ask
her?"

At that last question, Shrowl paused in
the work of aggravation—not for want of
more words, but for want of encouragement
to utter them. For the first time since they had
kept house together, he had tried to provoke
his master and had failed. Mr. Treverton