“Your mother died a few weeks after you were born, and Sir Richard, who loved my mother in the face of his father’s displeasure, placed you in her care, while he rushed off, heart-broken, to find solace in Egypt.  It is said that he hated you because you were the cause of her death.  On the day after your birth, old Lord Brace changed his will and bequeathed a vast amount of unentailed property to you, to be held in trust by your father until you were twenty-one years of age.  I was almost two years old at the time, and the old man, unexpectedly compassionate, inserted a provision which, in the event that you were to die before that time, gave all this money to me on my twenty-first birthday.  The interest on this money, amounting to five thousand pounds annually, was to go to you regularly, in one case, or to me, in the other.  Oswald Banks was an American, whom my mother had met in London several years prior to her first marriage.  He was the London representative of a big Pennsylvania manufacturing concern.  He was ambitious, unscrupulous and clever beyond conception.  He still is all of these and more, for he is now a coward.

“Well, it was he who concocted the diabolical scheme to one day get possession of your inheritance.  He coerced my poor mother into acquiescense, and she became his wretched tool instead of an honoured wife and helpmate.  One night, when you were three weeks old, the house in which we lived was burned to the ground, the inmates narrowly escaping.  So narrow was the escape, in fact, that you were said to have been left behind in the confusion, and the world was told, the next day, that the granddaughter of Lord Brace had been destroyed by the flames.

“The truth, however, was not told.  My stepfather did not dare to go so far as to kill you.  It was he who caused the fire, but he had you removed to a small hotel in another part of the city some hours earlier, secretly, of course, but in charge of a trusted maid.  My mother was responsible for this.  She would not listen to his awful plan to leave you in the house.  But you might just as well have died.  No one was the wiser and you were given up as lost.  A week later, my mother and Mr. Banks started for America.  You and I were with them, but you went as the daughter of a maid-servant—­Ellen Hayes.

“This is the story as my mother has told it to me after all these years.  My stepfather’s plan, of course, was to place you where you could never be found, and then to see to it that our grandfather did not succeed in changing his will.  Moreover, he was bound and determined that he himself should be named as trustee—­when the fortune came over at Lord Brace’s death.  That part of it turned out precisely as he had calculated.  Let me go on a few months in advance of my story.  Lord Brace died, and the will was properly probated and the provisions carried out.  Brace Hall and the estates went to your father and the bequest came to me, for you were considered dead.  My stepfather