And what a strange thing it was, Brandon thought, that through the force of circumstances he himself should have been made to bring about such an unlikely thing!  That so young a man should want to marry was strange enough.  It was more strange that he should have fixed on the only woman in the world that his brother wanted.  This said brother had thought it the very climax of all that was strange that it should have devolved on him who had command of money and who knew the colonies, to make this early marriage possible.  But surely the climax of strangeness was rather here, that he had all this time been working as if on purpose to bring about the longing desire of his old step-father, which till then he had never heard of, depriving Valentine as much as was possible of his freedom, shutting him up to the course his father wanted him to follow, and preparing to send him as far as in this world he could be sent from the dreaded precincts of Melcombe.

Brandon had devoted out of his moderate patrimony a thousand pounds each to his step-brother and his step-sisters.  In the case of Valentine he had done more; he had in a recent visit to New Zealand bought some land with a dwelling-house on it, and to this place it was arranged that immediately on his marriage Valentine should sail.

Brandon felt a strong desire to go and look at Melcombe, for his step-father’s conduct with regard to it kept coming back to his mind with ever-fresh surprise; but though he searched his memory it could yield him nothing, not a hint, not a look, from any one which threw the least light on this letter.

“But that there’s crime at the core of it, or some deep disgrace,” he soliloquized, “appears to me most evident, and I take his assurance in its fullest meaning that he had nothing to do with it.”

The next morning, having slept over the contents of the letter, he went to his upper room, locked himself in, and read it again.  Then after pausing a while to reconsider it, he went up to the wall to look at a likeness of Dorothea Graham.  Valentine had a photographing machine, and had filled the house with portraits of himself and his beloved.  This was supposed to be one of the best.  “Lucky enough that I had the sense to leave this behind me,” thought Brandon.  “Yes, you sweet thing, I am by no means breaking my heart now about you and your love for that boy.  You are sure to marry him; you have a faithful heart, so the best thing for him will be to let you marry as soon as possible.  I’ll tell him so as we walk to John Mortimer’s to-day.  I’ll tell him he may do it as soon as he likes.”

Accordingly as about six o’clock he and Valentine walked through a wood, across a common, and then over some fields, Brandon began to make some remarks concerning the frequent letters that passed between these youthful lovers.  “It is not to be supposed,” he observed, “that any lady would correspond with you thus for years if she had not fully made up her mind to accept you in the end.”