of my identity.  It is not long ago, only one hundred and fifty years, since David Hume was robbed of his birthright, and what is such a period to the old families of England and Japan?  There are men living in Japan to-day who saw his son in the flesh.  I am his lawful descendant.  I came to England and resolved to be an Englishman.  But I needed money.  Do you remember our motto, ’A new field gives a small crop’?  The first Japanese Hume did not prosper.  He was a good fighter, but he saved no yen.  So I applied to my family.  I came here on the New Year’s Eve, and Sir Alan Hume-Frazer saw me walking up the avenue.  He stepped out through that window to meet me.  He was surprised at my appearance, and thought I was his cousin Robert, whom he had not seen for years.”

At this remarkable statement the four listeners chiefly concerned looked wonderingly at each other.  The main incidents of the family feud were repeating themselves in a ghostly manner.

Ooma paid no heed to their amazement.  He staggered unsteadily to a chair and sank into it limply.  It was the chair which David Hume occupied when he slept, and dreamed.  Not even Winter saw cause for suspicion in the act.  Ooma was dying.  His yellow skin was now green.  His lips were white.  His whole frame was sinking.  At this phase he became a Japanese, and lost all likeness to the Frazers.

He continued, with an odd cackle: 

“I kept up the error.  I demanded money as my right, and from his words I gathered that the Frazers had been at their old tricks and defrauded another relative.”

Robert started.

“Do you hear?” he murmured to Brett.  “That accounts for Alan’s strange reception of me the same day.”

Brett held up a warning hand.  Ooma was still talking.

“I taunted him with thriving on the plunder of his own people.  That made him furious.  He raved about the world being in league against him.  The only relative he loved, one who was more than brother, had stolen the woman he wished to marry; his sister was a living lie; his cousin a blackmailer.  I laughed.  ‘Do you disown your sister, then?’ I asked.  He took from his breast-pocket some papers—­you will find them there, on the table—­and told me, in great anger, that he possessed proof that she was not his sister.  I was cooler than he, and saw the value of this admission I pretended to go away, but hid among the trees and saw him walk about the library for nearly an hour.  I meant to enter the house if an opportunity presented itself, and, trusting to my appearance, go to his bedroom, if he changed his clothes and went out.  But he helped me by placing the papers in the drawer which I afterwards broke open.  I saw him meet you”—­he feebly pointed to Robert.  “I saw you arrive in the carriage,” and he indicated David.  “Then I determined to wait until the night I went back to Stowmarket, where I left a portmanteau at a small hotel”—­Brett knew that