“Can you postpone all your other engagements and come to Cornwall on receipt of this?  If you will telegraph the train you travel by I will have a conveyance to meet you at Penzance and bring you to Flint House.  This is a matter of importance.”

A postscript followed in the strangest contrast to the formal note—­a postscript hasty and blotted, which had evidently been added in extreme agitation of mind—­

    “For God’s sake lose no time.  Come at once.”

The tremulous urgent words stared out from the surface of the grey paper in all the piteous futility of an appeal made too late.  Glancing up, Mr. Brimsdown’s eye rested on the shelf where the deed box of Robert Turold reposed, and he mechanically reflected that it would be necessary to have the word “Deceased” added to the white-lettered inscription on the black surface.  Mr. Brimsdown sighed.  Then, shaking off the quiescence of mind which his brooding had engendered, he applied his faculties to the consideration of a situation which at first sight seemed fantastic as a nightmare.

The letter was not more remarkable than its despatch after the writer’s death, but the summons to Cornwall was not in itself surprising.  He recalled a similar visit to Norfolk some years before, and the recent correspondence between them made it clear that the claim had reached a stage which required careful legal handling.  Robert Turold had forwarded copies of the final proofs of the family descent discovered in Cornwall, and Mr. Brimsdown had prepared the claim for the termination of abeyance which was to be heard by the House of Lords.  Mr. Brimsdown was also aware of the summoning of the other members of the family to Cornwall to impart the news to them.  A very natural and proper proceeding on Robert Turold’s part, he had deemed it.

He believed he knew every intimate detail of the ambition on which Robert Turold had immutably set his heart.  Had they not been discussed between them, again and again, in that room—­his bitterness that he had no son, his fear that the regained title might be extinguished again in female descent, his grievance that the succession could not be altered.  It was his dream to found a new line of Turralds, and be remembered as the head of it.  “If you could only get the descent taken outside the limits of the original creation, Brimsdown—­” The harsh voice, uttering these words, seemed to reach Mr. Brimsdown in the muffled silence at that moment.  He had told him, again and again, that the thing was impossible.  If the Turrald barony was called out of abeyance it was an act of Royal grace and favour.  They had no rights—­he insisted on that—­and any attempt to influence the Crown about the line of succession might endanger the claim.

And now Robert Turold was dead in the midst of his plans—­dead when he had almost gained the peak of his dreams.