The desk was soon opened.  He lifted one half, saw several old miniatures which had belonged to his own father’s family, a lock of his father’s hair which he remembered to have seen in his mother’s possession, and one or two trinkets.  No letter.

It was not without some slight trepidation that he opened the other side, and there, nothing else being with it, a large letter sealed with black and directed to himself in his step-father’s well-known hand, it was lying.

As he took the letter up, a sensation so faint, so ethereal that it is hard to describe or characterize it, but which most of us have felt at least once, came over him, or rather came about him, as if something from without suggested a presence.

He was free from any sensation of fear, but he chose to speak; lifting up his face as if the old man had been standing before him, he said aloud, “Yes, I promised.”  The feeling was gone as he spoke, and he broke the seal.

A long letter.  His eyes, as it was folded, fell first on these surprising words, “I forbade my mother to leave her property to me,” and then, “I have never judged her,” the aged writer continued, “for in her case I know not what I could have done.”

Brandon laid the letter down, and took a moment for thought, before he could make up his mind to read it through.  Some crime, some deep disgrace, he perceived was about to be confided to him.  With a hurried sense of dislike and shrinking from acquaintance with it, he wondered whether his own late mother had known anything of it, then whether he was there called upon to divulge it now, and to act.  If not, he argued with himself, why was it to be confided to him?

Then he addressed himself to his task, and read the letter through, coming to its last word only to be still more surprised, as he perceived plainly that beyond what he could gather from those two short sentences already quoted, nothing was confided or confessed, nothing at all—­only a request was made to him, and that very urgently and solemnly, but it concerned not himself, but his young brother Valentine, for not content with repudiating the family property for himself, the old father was desirous, it was evident, through his step-son, to stand in the way and bar his own son’s very remote chance of inheriting it either.

A thing that is very unexpected and moderately strange, we meet with wide-opened eyes, with a start and perhaps exclamations; but a thing more than strange, utterly unaccounted for, quite unreasonable, and the last thing one could have supposed possible as coming from the person who demanded it, is met in far quieter fashion.

Brandon leaned back in his chair and slowly looked about him.  He was conscious that he was drawing deeper breath than usual, and that his heart beat quickly, but he was so much surprised that for the moment his thoughts appeared to scatter themselves about, and he knew not how to marshal them and make them help him as to what this might mean.