“Good heavens!” exclaimed Valentine, in an awestruck whisper.  “Then it has come to this, after all?”

He sat silent so long, that his brother had full time once more to consider this subject in all its bearings, to perceive that Valentine was trying to discover some reasonable cause for what his father had done, and then to see his countenance gradually clear and his now flashing eyes lose their troubled expression.

“I know you have respected my poor father’s confidence,” he said at last.

“Yes, I have.”

“And you never heard anything from him by word of mouth that seemed afterwards to connect itself with this affair?”

“Yes, I did,” Brandon answered, “he said to me just before my last voyage, that he had written an important letter, told me where it was, and desired me to observe that his faculties were quite unimpaired long after the writing of it.”

“I do not think they could have been,” Valentine put in, and he continued his questions.  “You think that you have never, never heard him say anything, at any time which at all puzzled or startled you, and which you remembered after this?”

“No, I never did.  He never surprised me, or excited any suspicion at any time about anything, till I had broken the seal of that letter.”

“And after all,” Valentine said, turning the pages, “how little there is in it, how little it tells me!”

“Hardly anything, but there is a great deal, there is everything in his having been impelled to write it.”

“Well, poor man” (Giles was rather struck by this epithet), “if secrecy was his object, he has made that at least impossible.  I must soon know all, whatever it is.  And more than that, if I act as he wishes, in fact, as he commands, all the world will set itself to investigate the reason.”

“Yes, I am afraid so,” Brandon answered, “I have often thought of that.”

Valentine went on.  “I always knew, felt rather, that he must have had a tremendous quarrel with his elder brother.  He never would mention him if he could help it, and showed an ill-disguised unforgiving sort of—­almost dread, I was going to say, of him, as if he had been fearfully bullied by him in his boyhood and could not forget it; but,” he continued, still pondering, “it surely is carrying both anger and superstition a little too far, to think that when he is in his grave it will do his son any harm to inherit the land of the brother he quarrelled with.”

“Yes,” said Giles, “when one considers how most of the land of this country was first acquired, how many crimes lie heavy on its various conquerors, and how many more have been perpetrated in its transmission from one possessor to another;” then he paused, and Valentine took up his words.

“It seems incredible that he should have thought an old quarrel (however bitter) between two boys ought, more than half a century afterwards, to deprive the son of one of them from taking his lawful inheritance.”