“He!” said Eloise, with sublime scorn.  “The property is mine!  My father left such commands!”

“But he can have no other reason for being here.  Strange the lawyer didn’t write!  He is certainly at home again.”

“I have not had time to open the mail to-day; it lies in the hall.  Hazel! the mail-bag.”

And directly afterward its contents were before her.

She hurriedly shifted and reshifted the letters of factors and agents, and broke the seal of one, while Earl St. George Erne deliberately warmed his long white hands at the blaze, and, supposing Eloise Changarnier to be a guest of the lonely Mrs. Arles, wondered with some angry amusement at her singular deportment.

Mrs. Arles was right.  The letter in Eloise’s hand, which had been intended to reach her earlier, was from their old lawyer, but lately returned from England.  In it he informed her that the scrap of paper on the authority of which she had assumed control of the property was worthless,—­and that not only was Earl St. George Erne the heir of his cousin, but that some three years previously he had lent that cousin a sum of money sufficient to cover much more than the whole value of The Rim, taking in payment only promissory notes, whose indorser was since insolvent.  This sum—­as Mr. Erne the elder had been already unfortunate in several rash speculations—­had been applied towards lifting a heavy mortgage, and instituting improvements that would enable the farm soon to repay the debt in yearly instalments.  Added to this was the fact that Earl St. George Erne, who had passed many years away from home upon Congressional duties, had lately met with a severe reverse himself, and had now nothing in the world except this lucky inheritance from his cousin, and into this he had been inducted by all legal forms.  This had transpired during the lawyer’s absence, (that person wrote,) as otherwise some provision might have been made for Miss Changarnier,—­and not being able to meet with Mr. St. George Erne, he had learned the facts from others.  Meantime she would see, that, even if her father left to her all he died possessed of, he died possessed of nothing.

The idea that anybody should dare to controvert her father’s will flared for a moment behind Eloise’s facial mask, and illumined every feature.  Then her eye fell upon the mass of papers with the inextricable confusion of their figures.  An exquisitely ludicrous sense of retributive justice seized her, heightened, perhaps, by some surprise and nervous excitement; she fairly laughed,—­a little, low bubble of a laugh,—­swept her letters into her apron, and, with the end of it hanging over her arm, stepped towards Mr. St. George, and offered him her hand.  He thought she was a crazy girl.  But there was the hand; he took it, and, looking at her a moment, forgot to drop it,—­an error which she rectified.

“It seems, then, that you are the owner of The Rim,” said she.  “I had been dreaming myself to be that very unfortunate person,—­a nightmare from which you wake me.  The steward will show you over it to-morrow.  You will find your exchequer in the escritoire-drawer in the cabinet across the hall.  You will find the papers and accounts on that table, and I wish you joy of them!”